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Landing Page Essentials

From brick and mortar business owners looking to build their email list for the first time, to the most seasoned digital promoters, we're all at different levels of marketing know-how. But regardless of where you might fall on that spectrum, it never hurts to head back to the basics, and dig into the absolute best practices for your marketing.

This landing page course will be the most comprehensive selection of content we can provide you. We'll show you the depth and variety of uses for landing pages including how to create high-converting pages in no time, using the techniques and best practices we've learned through the millions of visits our customers receive to their Leadpages landing pages every single day.

It's essential to remember that when we start on the same page, we can grow together, and build our knowledge to help grow our businesses. To that end, let's start at the very beginning by defining exactly what a landing page is.

Landing Page Definition

At Leadpages, we like to remind people what a landing page is not. For starters, a landing page isn't just any page you arrive on for a particular website. It's not necessarily your website's homepage either.

Instead, a landing page is a webpage that is designed to take web traffic, and convert visitors in a particular way, for a particular reason.

In other words, landing pages are created to get people to do something (ideally, just one thing). And there's a few primary actions any business might want people to complete on a given landing page.

Subscribe to an email list or newsletter.

Download a piece of content (like an ebook or free report).

Register for a live and/or digital events like webinars or conferences.

Purchase an actual product or service being offered.

You might notice that all of these behaviors have something in common. They are all ways that anonymous or fleeting website visitors can be converted into leads.

That's because at the end of the day, the primary purpose of any landing page, is in fact lead generation.

Landing pages are built to grow your email list (and your audience) so that you can promote future products and events to a warm audience, build a community, and grow your business.

Need a quick refresher on what exactly a landing page is?

Watch as our Educational Content Creator, Ryan Kopperud breaks down the ins and outs of what a landing page really is. In just two minutes, he'll talk about what they are and what they can do for you and your business.

4 Types of Landing Pages

When, where, and how you use a landing page can determine the sub-genre of landing page you might use. Don't worry, we won't get too much into complicated definitions here. But it's worth noting that what we refer to as landing pages can also be called one of the following.

Splash Page

A common type of landing page is a splash page (also occasionally called a splash screen or a welcome gate). Splash pages are often used as an introductory page on a website, which is why the term "welcome gate" gets used as well. Essentially, it's a single page visitors see before they can enter your site.

You can think of it as an introductory page for a website that provides valuable information or is designed for common lead collection purposes as well. Business owners often use a splash page so they can immediately ask new visitors to join their email list.

Squeeze Page

A squeeze page is just another word for "landing page." It's called that because this type of landing page is designed to squeeze information out of visitors—specifically an email address. Squeeze pages are like landing pages, in that their purpose is—you guessed it—lead generation. However, they often feature a wide variety of shapes, sizes, lengths, and content types.

When you see the term squeeze page, you can more than likely interchange the words landing page. Sometimes, squeeze pages feature a progression of information, testimonials, and context, which are all designed to "squeeze" a visitor into converting or making a purchase.

Capture Page

Another industry term you might see frequently in reference to landing pages is the term capture page (or more formally seen as a lead capture page). Once again, this is basically a synonym for a landing page (and the aforementioned squeeze page). Just like with squeeze pages or landing pages, capture pages are designed to (you guessed it) capture leads.

There's nothing specific you really need to know beyond that—just keep in mind that these phrases are interchangeable.

Sales Page

Ideally, you will want to provide value to your website visitors before you ask for them to purchase from you. However, in some circumstances,, you might want to start selling your product or service to first time visitors. For that, you'll want a sales page. A sales page is a landing page that uses copy, testimonials, videos, or other elements to sell your products or services instead of focusing on lead generation.

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Landing Page Elements

Now that we have a solid and agreed-upon landing page definition, and we've covered some common terms and synonyms for landing pages, we're ready to discuss what kinds of elements belong on your landing pages.

It's important to remember that nearly every kind of business—from brick and mortar stores to digital marketers—use landing pages. That's why no two landing pages are really alike. Since their uses range far and wide, landing pages are constantly changing to meet the needs of both their creators and their visitors.

That being said, there are four elements of a landing page that we commonly find across the highest-converting landing pages.

An Engaging Headline

You probably wouldn't pick up a newspaper or a magazine if it didn't have an engaging headline, right? Or what if you saw a newspaper lying on a diner counter somewhere with all the text the same size font on the front page? Would you read that? We sure wouldn't, and we're guessing you probably wouldn't either.

It's the same with your landing pages. The most important element on any landing page is your headline.

Your headline tells your readers exactly where they are, why they're here, and gives them a reason to keep reading. Like a well-crafted newspaper headline, your landing page headline also entices your would-be customers to stick around and see what you have to offer.

A landing page without an engaging headline isn't much of a landing page at all—and in our experience, will never drive a quality conversion rate for you and your business.

In a later chapter of this course, we'll speak more to the exact specifics of writing an engaging headline for your landing page. For now, here are a few questions to ask yourself when you want to create a clear and powerful headline:

"What is my landing page offering here?"

"Why does my audience need it?"

"Why is this the only place they can get it?"

If your headline answers these three questions in a compelling and concise fashion, you'll be well on your way to generating more leads.

A Compelling Offer

Landing pages are designed to get your would-be customers to take action. The best way to inspire people to take action is to give them a clear and compelling offer.

Whether you want your web visitors to purchase your product or service, join your email list, or take some other desired action on your page, you have to offer them something valuable in return.

It might sound simple, but many marketers forget to offer some specific value on their landing pages. They don't explain exactly what people will receive if they purchase or give their email address on their landing pages—and why people should want it.

No matter what your landing page is used for, you're inevitably offering something. It might be software, it might be a free ebook, it might be a webinar, or it might be a professional service—but in exchange for money and/or an email address, you're offering some kind of value.

It's essential to be as clear and specific as possible about what exactly that offer is. The more compelling your offer, the more likely your visitors are to see the reason they should complete your desired action, and know exactly why it will benefit them.

Why use good imagery on your landing pages? It's the same reason why food trucks are painted bold, beautiful colors. It works.

People are more willing to do business with anyone or anything that appears professional, and good aesthetics are an important part of that.

Think of it this way. If someone tried to sell you tacos out of the side of a rusty minivan with broken windows, would you buy one? Not likely. It's the same for your customers. Your customers are more likely to respond to visually appealing, professional-looking landing pages.

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A Good Call-to-Action

Most often, when you hear people mention a call-to-action (or "CTA"), they are talking about the button on your landing pages that your customers click to join your email list, purchase your product, register for your webinar, etc.

In order to nail your conversions and generate more leads and sales, each of your landing pages needs to have an enticing call-to-action. We'll talk more about exactly how to craft compelling copy for your CTA buttons later on in this course, but for now it's important to understand that a good CTA should be clear, well written, easy to see, and easy to execute by one of your web visitors.

Even more important, your button copy should highlight the value of executing your CTA. For instance, many business owners use generic button copy like "buy now" for their sales pages. But if you use the words "Buy Now" your visitors don't necessarily recognize the value of clicking that button. Instead, they recognize that they're buying something and paying money for it. There's also some ambiguity around what they're buying, because you're not explaining what you're purchasing in this "Buy Now" command.

On the other hand, if your button says, "Start Learning French Today" your customers will know exactly why they want to click the button. If you can highlight what your customers will receive or what value they will receive by clicking your CTA button, you're more than likely going to dramatically increase your conversions.

Landing Page Best Practices

Now that you've got a good understanding of the four primary elements a landing page should have, let's get into additional best practices your pages should include for best results.

In a later chapter, we're going to talk very specifically about writing your landing page copy and creating your landing page design so don't worry about the exact specifics right now. We want to make sure you've got a good general understanding of landing pages as a whole before we dig deeper into the details.

Often, you'll see best practices shift a bit depending on the exact purpose of any given landing page. That being said, there are a few best practices that nearly every landing page has in common.

At Leadpages we believe the best landing pages:

Are easy to follow.

Are mobile-friendly.

Use clear language.

Feature clean design.

Contain a valuable offer.

Let's explore each of these in brief now.

1. The Best Landing Pages Are Easy to Follow

It's no secret that attention is fleeting on the internet. Regardless of whether you have an active and engaged community visiting your landing pages, or you're sending cold and brand new traffic to them, there's no guarantee anyone will stay on your landing page. This is especially if your page isn't easy to follow.

That's why the best landing pages make it as easy as humanly possible for your visitors to understand all the information on that page, and complete the action you want them to take. As a marketer, you should always make the user experience as frictionless as you can. When you do, then carrying out the intended behavior becomes intuitive and desirable for your visitors—especially if it's the only action your visitors can take on your page.

So what does this mean for you when creating your landing pages?

Make sure all of the copy on your page is essential. Cut away any unnecessary words.

Use the design of your page, including arrows and sightlines, to guide visitors to your call-to-action.

Be sure all text is sized appropriately and easy to read.

Use contrasting colors to make all text and page elements easy to understand.

2. The Best Landing Pages Are Mobile Friendly

Whether with tablets or smartphones, we continue to see our online lives through the lens of a mobile device. That's why any and every landing page you create must be responsive and mobile friendly. Ignoring this best practice will have a negative impact on your business.

If a prospect or customer visits your landing page from their mobile device, you have to make it just as easy for them to see, read, understand, purchase, or submit information on that device as it would be from a desktop or laptop computer.

Unless you're coding your own landing pages, you shouldn't need to know the exact advanced HTML and CSS techniques in order to make this happen. Generally speaking, this should be taken care of by the landing page builder you purchase and use.

For instance, at Leadpages we provide our users with hundreds of high-performing landing page templates, each of which are both designed and coded to work just as perfectly (and beautifully) on a smartphone or tablet screen as they function on a laptop or desktop.The Best Landing Pages Are Easy to Follow

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3. The Best Landing Pages Use Clear Language

It might surprise you how frequently we encounter landing pages that are simply unclear in their purpose or offer. If a visitor on your landing page doesn't understand—clearly, and quickly—why they should be there, they will inevitably leave soon after.

The only way to combat this undesired behavior is by having clear, concise language on your landing pages. If your visitors have a limited time and attention span, you have to give them a simple and compelling explanation of why they should stay. Consider your audience. Use terminology your ideal customers will understand and write at a reading level that they will appreciate (aim for an 8.0 score on the Flesch-Kincaid test). Do not over-complicate matters.

For example, sometimes marketers will fill up their landing pages with unnecessary questions, and unintentionally create a FAQ page for their offer. When instead they should be clearly answering potential visitors' unasked questions in their copy.

4. The Best Landing Pages Feature Clean Design

We will devote an entire section of this course to landing page design. For now, it's important to understand that a clean landing page design is best for your conversions. This goes along with the "supportive imagery" we mentioned above. While general aesthetic can be subjective and dependent upon the audience, clean design is something all landing page builders can (and should) employ.

At Leadpages, our landing page templates make designing a clean and modern landing page extremely easy. But as you're customizing your landing page to meet your exact needs, keep these three things in mind:

Simplify your page - The antithesis of clean design is adding too many elements on your page. Visitors are not likely to take action on your landing pages if there are too many images, icons, blocks of text, buttons, and elements to distract them. Keeping your page simple, using white space to break up your elements, and reducing page elements will help your conversion rate and contribute to a cleaner design.

Use fewer colors - Too many colors on your landing pages can also overwhelm your visitors. If your text, images, buttons, and backgrounds are all different colors, your landing page will be too intense and hard for visitors to look at. As a general rule, fewer colors and a clean color scheme will almost always lead to higher conversions (and create a more enjoyable experience for your visitors).

Reduce fonts and sizes - Some marketers think adding new font styles and font sizes to every new section or line of text keeps things interesting on your landing pages. But in reality, it just makes your landing pages difficult to read. Our brains use patterns to focus and concentrate, and the more you use different fonts and text sizes on your page, the more you interrupt your visitors' focus. To create a better experience and up your conversions, use no more than two different fonts and three sizes.

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5. The Best Landing Pages Contain a Valuable Offer

This should go without saying, but for any landing page to be effective, it has to contain a valuable offer. And it can't just seem to contain a valuable offer, because the content you provide will set the tone for the rest of your sales process. You're beginning a relationship with your prospects and clients.

If you promise someone a comprehensive glossary of terms in your industry in exchange for their email address on one of your landing pages, then you have to deliver. If a prospect signs up for your glossary and then you give them five words with definitions copied from Merriam Webster in a Word document, you're not setting a great tone for that prospect in the future. They're not going to trust you or view you as an authority. They certainly won't share your content or your offer with their peers. More than likely, they also won't want to do business with you in the future, if they want to interact with you at all.

That's why your landing page has to offer something of value. Remember, valuable doesn't mean expensive, and it doesn't mean time consuming. Your knowledge is valuable. If you can deliver a truly useful portion of your brain to your potential customers or prospects in a professional looking format, your relationship with your new lead will start out on the right foot.

Take the time to create a valuable offer, and you'll end up thanking yourself (and so will your bank account) in the future.

In Conclusion

Ta da! We've made it to the end of the first chapter here, and we've created a great foundation for your landing pages. We've got an agreed upon landing page definition, covered some other key terms, types and synonyms for landing pages, discussed common landing page elements, and covered some best practices to keep in mind as we proceed.

Remember how we mentioned that there's a wide variety of uses and purposes for landing pages? Well next up, we'll get more specific about what people do use landing pages for, and what you could use landing page for in your business. Later, we'll get into exactly how to build landing pages, including step-by-step directions for copy and design, testing and optimization, and more.

Was this section of The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages valuable to you? Download this entire chapter in PDF form for free.

Leadpages is the number one landing page builder in the world. With over 40,000 customers, and billions of visits to the landing pages that've been built by our clients, we've learned a lot about lead generation and growing small business—and we're excited to share that knowledge with you.

How To Leverage Landing Pages For Your Business

Landing pages are everywhere on the internet. You've probably already visited at least one today without having the thought:

"Hey, this must be a landing page! I'm on one right now!"

But remember, landing pages aren't just the page you land on when you arrive on a website. Just because you enter a website through the home page (or "land" there) doesn't make a website's homepage a landing page. In fact, that goes for any other page you might visit, for any given website. Just because you land on the page, doesn't make it a landing page.

It may sound confusing, but it's actually quite simple. Landing pages have a very specific purpose. And that purpose is conversions. In simplest terms: A landing page entices visitors to take an action.

The way most landing pages accomplish this is by reducing the amount of actions visitors can take on the page, down to the most important one. This helps arriving visitors know exactly what they should do, and prevents them from becoming distracted, not accomplishing that desired behavior, and exiting the page.

Also, in the last chapter, we answered the question, "What is a landing page?" For a full learning course on what landing pages are, click here. Now, in this chapter, we'll be looking at good landing page examples and a wide variety of use cases, to help you discern how landing pages can work for you.

Ready for a reminder of what a landing page is?

Watch as our Educational Content Creator, Ryan Kopperud breaks down the ins and outs of what a landing page really is. In just two minutes, he'll talk about what they are and what they can do for you and your business.

Getting Landing Page Conversions

While there are nearly endless use cases for landing pages, there are three main types of landing pages—used for three separate kinds of conversions. You've probably encountered at least one (if not all) of these landing pages types in your internet history, and you might even already be using one or more of these for your business right now. Let's briefly go over the three types of landing pages:

1. Lead Collection Landing Pages

The first type of conversion that many people use landing pages for is lead collection, or essentially, a way to obtain someone's email address or other contact details. Some people simply ask for this information, while others promise some kind of value in return, like a consultation, a piece of content, a free online course, a compilation of podcast episodes, and the list goes on and on.

2. Sales Pages for Products or Services

The second type of conversion that people build landing pages for is sales. Sounds simple enough, right? When you remove the distractions of common web pages that we talked about earlier (like various menu options, ads, promoted posts, or simply the close button), you give visitors only one simple choice: buying your product or service.

That's why so many digital marketers and business owners find landing pages to be an invaluable tool for making sales.

3. Event Registration Landing Pages

The third conversion type that landing pages are often used for is registering web visitors for live or online events. With a small amount of information, it's fairly simple to encourage people to take an action on a landing page. That's why these pages are a perfect instrument for converting visitors into registrants. This is also a common form of lead collection, but event registration pages are tailored specifically to invite these leads to an online or in person event, so they can sell them a product during the actual event.

Using Landing Pages to Distribute Information

A secondary, but also very important reason that digital marketers and business owners use landing pages, is simply providing information. At Leadpages, our builder features simple drag and drop tools, easy text editors, and fast deployment to custom domains or hosted links, so you can create informative, high-converting, and attractive landing pages in a matter of minutes.

That's why marketers who simply want to drive prospects or customers to informational content find landing pages to be the fastest and most effective method to distribute this information. (This information content can be a manifesto-style blog post, a page that hosts images from a past event, a single location for all the testimonials about your business, a thank you page after a purchase, etc.)

You can think of these types of landing pages almost as mini-sites, used as a fast and centralized web pages for a singular purpose.

Ecommerce powerhouse Four51 succeeds with Leadpages

"Leadpages has helped us increase our efficiency in creating lead gen experiences for all of the different campaigns we have going on… Because of this, we've been able to increase our leads per month by close to 100%."

- Kayla Bryant, Marketing Director at Four51

Using Landing Pages for Content Marketing

We've previously discussed that many digital marketers and online businesses are using landing pages to collect leads. Simply asking people for their email address, however, isn't always the most effective way to do that. Enter content marketing—one of the primary lead generation tactics.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the simple process of creating a piece of content, and trading it for a prospect's email address, via a digital exchange. It's not only a way of starting a relationship with potential customers, but it builds trust with your visitors from the start.

Our friends at the Content Marketing Institute have a great working definition of content marketing, which they describe as:

Leadpages Manager of Marketing Education, Bob The Teacher explored this concept in a different way in our Email List Building Course. In this course, Bob shares the "loaf of bread" analogy he learned from marketing automation expert Chris L. Davis to describe your lead generation process. You can look at the product or service you're trying to sell your customers as a loaf of bread and your valuable content as a "slice of that bread." If you want to sell your potential customers on buying that loaf of bread (or your product), you should be giving away a "slice of that bread" as your valuable piece of free content in exchange for your prospect's email address. It's a taste of what you do, that sets the tone and whets the appetites of your leads.

This is where content marketing comes in. You're trying to get more leads or prospects into your funnel.

Your customer base is trying to find knowledge, information, services, and products that can help them succeed.

By giving your prospects valuable free information (or even a "slice of your overall product"), you're participating in that exchange. That is known as content marketing. To do it well, it's essential to create quality content. It's also essential to create landing pages to give yourself the best opportunity to collect leads in exchange for that quality content.

GE Digital drives massive content marketing ROI with Leadpages.

"Any time a new content asset is produced, we'd like to automatically create a Leadpage and a couple of variations to test, then run campaigns to those pages indefinitely… Our conversion rates have been very high, and it's time to get them even higher by testing different Leadpages out."

This accomplishes more than simply generating leads. Businesses that provide valuable content in exchange for a lead's email address establish trust in their products and services, and provide lasting benefits to their visitors and customers.

How do you start content marketing?

Content marketing can seem daunting especially to new business owners. But in reality, all you need to do is create a valuable piece of content, like a short ebook, a video, a checklist, a buying guide, etc. and create a landing page to give it away to start collecting email addresses.

Remember, just because the piece of content you create is valuable doesn't mean it has to take a ton of time and resources to create. It also doesn't need to cost you a penny to create either. Here, we've put together five fast steps to helping you successfully knock out your first content piece.

1. Brainstorm your topic.

Ask yourself: "What does my audience want?" Think about what people who want your product or service would be interested in. If you already have an audience, you can go ahead and try asking them directly (in a survey, email, social media etc.)! Ask your customers: What types of value can they get from you in the future? What's something you can easily talk or write about that demonstrates you're an authority in your field?

2. Decide on your content format.

Ask yourself: "What am I willing to create that my audience would most want from me." For example, you might not have time to write a 10 page ebook, but then again, your audience might not have time to read one either. And that's okay! There's always other ways to create content. For example, could your content be filmed quickly as a video—even just with your cell phone? What about creating a one-page buying guide or checklist from a popular template you download online? Whatever you decide, be sure it's something you know will be valuable to your prospects, something that's easy to create, and something consistent with what they may want to buy from you in the future.

3. Outline your content piece.

Before diving in, it's great to create a rough outline or mind map before you get started. You don't have to fully adhere to it later, but just having some mile markers in place before you start your journey can make a world of difference later on. Sometimes the best way to think about an outline, is listing what the primary takeaways you'd want someone reading it to receive. From there, you can further flesh out those takeaways with supporting thoughts and evidence.

4. Write your content piece.

Dive in! You're the expert in your field, so trust your instincts, and write what you think will be of value without giving away too much of your product or service. Remember, the average person reads about 250 words per minute. You'll want to be conscious of that as you write to your final length. If it's narration for a video, most people only read aloud 150-200 words per minute, so keep that in mind as well.

5. Design and save your final piece of content.

There are numerous templates available online to help you create your first piece of content marketing, if you're making a guide, an ebook, or a checklist of some kind. If you need some design help, there's great services like Upwork, Fiverr and others that will help take your writing over the finish line with a professional look, for very little money too.

Once you've completed the above steps, and you've got your proud first content piece in hand, you're ready to start content marketing with landing pages! It'll be time to create your first landing page, and trade email addresses for that awesome and valuable piece of content you produced.

Ready to create an incredibly effective landing page?

Discover our top landing page secrets using our free four-step Leadpages tutorial. We'll help you understand key concepts about building landing pages and what really makes them tick.

Using Landing Pages for Event Promotion

Another popular use of landing pages that we mentioned above is for promoting events. At Leadpages, we swear by promoting our events with landing pages. In fact, we do it all the time.

Creating a quick and easy landing page only takes about 10 minutes inside Leadpages. That means you can pick a topic for your event, select a date, collect any other relevant information, and deploy a landing page that tells people about that event, registers them, and/or sells tickets in no time at all.

We've used landing pages for both our webinars and live events consistently in the past, and we've used them to fill up our webinars, every week for years. Whether you're hosting events online or in-person, landing pages pages are perfect for your marketing, because of their high conversion rates and ease of deployment.

Webinar Landing Pages for Event Promotion

Webinars are fantastic tools for conversion. When potential customers attend your webinars, you can create a personal dynamic with those prospects and allow for tons of valuable information to be packed into a short period of time. Also, since they can be live and limited in the number of allowed attendees, webinars promote a level of scarcity that make them a highly valued piece of content.

We've been promoting our two weekly webinars using landing pages since Leadpages became a company, and we've found huge success in it.

See the webinar landing page Leadpages uses every single week.

At Leadpages, we drive thousands of prospects to this webinar page, and use it to generate tons of attendees to our webinars while converting hundreds of new clients every month.

Using Landing Pages for Follow Ups & Replays

If you've completed a webinar, a landing page is a perfect place to send people to a replay. Sure, you could send people to a YouTube link or a Wistia page, but both of those locations are much further out of control than a landing page is—you can't collect more information from a YouTube page, you can't easily sell anything on a Wistia landing page, and you can't easily control the look, feel, and information around those videos. Equally important? The metrics you lose by not having a webinar replay on a landing page you own. You won't know how many people arrive, how many people return, how long they stay, or where they go next.

Dropping a webinar replay onto a landing ensures you can control the experience of your customer and learn more about their behavior. With the right metrics and calls-to-action in place, you're much more likely to convert webinar viewers into customers and more successfully grow your business.

Promoting Live Events with Landing Pages

At Leadpages, not only have we found great success with promoting our online events with landing pages, but we've found success by promoting our live in-person events using landing pages. With the ability to add tons of multimedia elements (like videos, gifs, and photos), sales copy, event details, as well as registration information and ticket purchasing,

Landing pages can be the one-stop shop for any live event promotion, too.

Registrations

With a landing page, it's easy to accept registrations. Simply embed registration forms directly or the page or collect email addresses with a Leadbox, to increase the number of registrations you have for one of your live events. With a focused space like a landing page, you can promote your event, generate new leads, obtain the contact information you need to market to your registrants, and get the highest number of attendees possible.

Inside Leadpages, you can collect both webinar registrations and leads for your email service provider (ESP) at the same time. So for example, you can use GoToWebinar or WebinarJam to collect webinar registrations and then send that same lead to your ESP like Drip, Infusionsoft, MailChimp, Hubspot or others to collect leads at the same time. This can all be done with a single opt-in on your webinar page.

Ticket Sales

It sounds simplistic, but all you need to do is add a buy button! We at Leadpages (and many of our clients) have found success by reducing the amount of actions a visitor can take to just selling a ticket to their live event on a landing page. With the Leadpages Drag and Drop builder, you can embed an EventBrite ticket widget right on your landing page.

This keeps visitors in one location, allowing you to market your event and drive ticket sales, all on one single page.

Leadpages gained 25,000 customers in less than two years. Learn how.

Webinar marketing has been an unbelievably effective tactic for us here at Leadpages, and you can make this tactic work just the same for you. In our free video course, we teach you the exact strategy Leadpages used for massive growth.

Using Landing Pages for Affiliate Marketing

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is, in its simplest form, an online business method where marketers sell another company's product or service, and receive a commission from any sales they drive. As you may already know, affiliate marketing is a perfect use case for landing pages, because they're easy to set up and drive traffic to.

This means anyone can quickly create a focused landing page that promotes an affiliate partner's service or a specific product (or number of related products) and drive affiliate sales and receive commissions. To illustrate what we mean by this, here's a fast crash course in how to easily get started using landing pages for your affiliate marketing efforts and income.

Three Fast Methods for Successful Affiliate Marketing with Landing Pages

1. Brainstorm your topic

One popular affiliate marketing strategy is to create a page that helps visitors and new prospects get started in your market. It's often referred to as a resources page. You can use resource pages to recommend affiliate products and services to your audience (using your unique affiliate links for each product). Many digital marketers make use of this technique. In fact, we have an affiliate program at Leadpages that allows our customers to collect a commission every time they recommend Leadpages, and make a sale.

Here's one example from digital marketing rockstar and friend to Leadpages, Pat Flynn:

By driving traffic to a resource page where the only exit links send visitors to affiliate resources, you'll drive commissions each each time someone buys one of the products you recommend. At the same time, they get professional insights and directed towards things that can help them be successful. This is one of those rare but delightful occasions where everyone wins!

For example, if I were a photographer, I might create a landing page that I link to off of my website. And on that page, I might write a description of the tools that I use to be a professional photographer, with a photograph and an affiliate link to buy it. This page could talk about the photo-editing software I use, my go-to camera, a few lenses, and an online service I use to sell and mail prints of my photographs. As an affiliate marketer, I would use affiliate links to drive traffic to all these outside web page, so I could collect commissions for each recommended sale.

You may very well not be a photographer, but you can see how driving affiliate commissions might work for you here.

Demystify affiliate marketing with our free 11-video course.

Whether you're brand new to affiliate marketing or you're already up and running, this 100% free course takes you step-by-step through how to generate more revenue for your business through affiliate commissions—with as little extra work as possible.

2. Create a Resource Guide Landing Page

As an affiliate marketer, you can also earn some fast commissions by combining the best practices of content marketing with a resource page like the one we just described.

You can do that by creating a resource guide landing page. A resource guide is a short piece of content that recommends, describes, and shows the most important resources you use, while using affiliate links to recommend these resources. Once you complete this piece of content, you can market this guide using a landing page.

When visitors opt-in to receive the content piece (that is, the resource guide) on your landing page, you'll receive a commission every time someone clicks through and purchases one of those resources in the resource guide (which is usually a PDF).

Once again, visitors get a solid piece of content that has recommendations to help them succeed, and marketers get affiliate commissions and the email address of the visitor. Another win-win situation!

3. Create a Long Form Squeeze Landing Page

Cold-selling a product or service to anyone can take some convincing. Skepticism and reservations may prevent someone from being ready to pull the trigger right away. That's why many affiliate marketers resort to a long form squeeze page, and drive traffic to it for their affiliate commissions.

The basics of this method are simple. You pick a product to sell and create something like an entire website housed on a single landing page. These pages are often SEO friendly, use multimedia elements, and have lots of content and options for visitors to purchase the intended product.

Imagine a landing page that has images, testimonials, samples, social proof, and engaging sales copy, all related to a single product—and the only links on that page are affiliate links to complete the purchase. As an affiliate marketer, you would then collect a commission every time you drive a sale from that long-form squeeze page.

This method can be a bit more intensive than the previous two, but it's a proven method affiliate marketers have used to grow their businesses.

Using Landing Pages for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC advertising is a common technique for driving traffic to any destination on the internet. But if you're going to buy ads to drive traffic, why not make that destination a landing page? Whether your web traffic is paid or organic, keeping people on a page can be difficult. Once your visitors arrive, they're more than likely ready to head to the next destination online quickly.

That's why your best return on investment will come from a well-constructed landing page with minimal (if any) navigation, a clear call-to-action, and an enticing benefit. With these essential elements in place, your landing page is much more likely to convert brief and passing web visitors into leads that you can email and keep in contact with time and time again.

If you're paying to drive people to an online location, make sure that location is a high-converting landing page. Using landing pages for pay-per-click advertising is so effective, because clear goals in both ads and on the landing page proper, will drive consistent intention and action from the people you attract.

How to Use Landing Pages for Pay-Per-Click Advertising

To get your wheels spinning we've put together a few fast steps to help you get started using PPC advertising with landing pages.

1. Select Your Advertising Platform

These days, you can buy pay-per-click ads almost anywhere. More content platforms and social media outlets are monetizing their information with advertising options every day. That's because people are paying for them, and more importantly, they work.

Reddit Ads - While there are fewer demographic targeting options, Reddit has many hyper-specific communities of people who are focused on a singular topic. Reddit ads are an emerging platform worth testing.

These 11 videos walk you through best practices of using Facebook advertising, including selecting relevant communities to advertise to, creating effective ads, designing landing pages that efficiently converts your traffic and much more.

2. Determine Your Offer

Before you can successfully advertise, you'll have to decide what your offer is going to be. Are you going to specifically advertise your product or service, trying to convince people to buy right away? Are you going to give away a free piece of content, in order to obtain people's email addresses, and get them familiar with your brand? Have you considered advertising a contest related to your product or service and requesting submissions?

Offers can vary greatly depending on what you want to accomplish with your ads, as well as the needs of your business. Whatever you decide, try to create an offer that's genuinely irresistible for your specific audience, so you can maximize the ROI of your ads.

3. Build Your Landing Page

Once you know which ad service you'd like to use and what you're offering, you'll want to build your landing page. We'll talk more about the exact steps you should take when building a landing page in a later module. But for now, there's a few best practices to consider related to the page you want to build, especially as it relates to your ad and your offer:

Offers can vary greatly depending on what you want to accomplish with your ads, as well as the needs of your business. Whatever you decide, try to create an offer that's genuinely irresistible for your specific audience, so you can maximize the ROI of your ads.

Make it Consistent - Most ad services will look for consistency, from your ad to your offer on your landing page. Using consistent language and visuals across all three elements will generally increase the chances of your ad being approved by platforms, and will also create a better experience for your visitors.

Make it Quality - Offers that feel spammy, fake, or poor in quality are often negatively received by both visitors and ad services. Be sure your ad, your offer, and your landing page are for a high quality product (service, ebook, webinar, etc.), and that your page execution reflects that level of quality as well.

Make it Relevant - When using PPC advertising you'll get the highest ROI the more relevant you can make your content. Since your visitors are likely coming to your ad and your landing page without knowing you, it's important to tailor-fit these elements to what they are looking for. The more specific your content is, the more likely they are to convert to a lead. The more relevant you can make your page copy, the better.

Walk through exactly how to build a landing page for PPC traffic.

This video tour shows our Head Product Educator, Jeff Wenberg, as he takes you through a Leadpages landing page template designed specifically for pay-per-click ads. He'll explain exactly how to design your own landing page to use with your advertisements.

4. Create Your Ad

Creating an effective PPC ad can feel intimidating but a few clear best practices in mind can make all the difference. The most important parts of creating an effective online ad are:

Good Copy - As with any advertising, you have only a short amount of time and space to compel visitors to act. You must write clear, powerful copy that encourages your reader to take action and click with every word. Take your time with this step. Research compelling ads, study ads that have converted you, and write as many versions as necessary until you're happy with the outcome.

Engaging Visuals - Not all ads will use pictures (like text-only Google ads) but many other ad services (like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) definitely will. For those services, it's essential to find a balance between images that support your ad and make it engaging to look at, without detracting from the purpose. Images of people can be powerful in ads. They can quite literally put a human face on your products or offers. Ideally, if you're using images of people, those people should be looking (or pointing) in the direction of your call-to-action. This subtle visual CTA can often lead to even higher conversions.

Concise Formatting - All ad platforms have character limits, so you'll have to stop typing eventually no matter what. That being said, creating the most concise and legible format for your ad is always a best practice. It's important to remember that from the words and images you choose to the offer and your product or service, you know your business inside and out. On the other hand, your new visitors and potential ad-clickers are seeing you and your business for the first time. Tailor your ad to them, and make it as short and easy to digest as possible.

5. Test Your Ads and Landing Pages

It should go without saying that you need to be testing your ads. Most, if not all, popular digital advertising platforms will provide you with comprehensive metrics around the ads you're buying, including how effective they are, what your conversion rate looks like, and more.

Don't be afraid to experiment and try new ads, new formats, different images, and even different ad platforms.

If you're paying to grow your business with pay-per-click advertising, optimizing both your ads (and your landing pages) is crucial. Through testing, you can determine the highest-converting ads and landing pages, and increase your ROI even faster.

One of the most essential elements to getting a conversion is first having traffic. A landing page with no traffic is a deserted island. But driving traffic to a high-converting landing page with pay-per-click advertising will ensure the greatest return on investment from those advertising dollars.

Imagery converts, and we've got you covered. In this 25 image pack, you'll get a wide variety of professional looking images that you can use, resize, layer text over, and more—completely free of charge. What are you waiting for?

Using Landing Pages for Video Marketing

Hosting your videos on YouTube works if you're just looking for a place to play and embed them. But if you want potential customers to join your email list or take another action after watching your video, then driving traffic to a YouTube link leaves something to be desired.

With a variety of related videos to distract your customers on the page, no control of the page itself, no ability to include email capture options or deeper information, it's difficult to use YouTube pages for marketing. And really, the same goes for many, if not most, video hosting services.

Get started with video marketing (free guide).

We've got an amazing infographic and an easy acronym to bring any fan of video up to speed. It's called the SLACK method, and it stands for:

Scripting

Lighting

Audio

Camera

Knowledge

We'll fill you in on the basics of all five elements, and help you make better videos for your business right away.

So if you're using videos in your marketing, or you want to start—how do you send prospects to a page that you can control? You use a landing page! With embed options, lead capture forms, customizable fonts and images, etc., you can put your video on a landing page and control the entire landscape around it. You'll get better analytics, and also be able to better convert your video viewers into leads and customers.

In Conclusion

The truth is, landing pages can be used for nearly anything you want to use them for. But at the end of the day, they're inherently designed to generate more leads for you, drive more sales for you, and grow your business.

Next up, we'll talk you through every step of building your landing page, from selecting the right template for your needs, to writing the best landing page copy, to creating the most effective landing design.

Was this section of the Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages valuable to you? Download this entire chapter in PDF form for free.

Leadpages is the number one landing page builder in the world. With over 40,000 customers, and billions of visits to the landing pages that've been built by our clients, we've learned a lot about lead generation and growing small business—and we're excited to share that knowledge with you.

5-Star Recipes For Creating Landing Pages

In the previous two chapters of The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages, we showed you all the different uses for landing pages, and why landing pages are so critical for growing your business. Now that we've got the basics under our belt, we're ready to start creating landing pages.

It's not uncommon for marketers to ask how to create a landing page. Many marketers find themselves stuck with an email service provider that comes with subpar landing page templates, because these companies focus on their email senders or automation instead of lead collection. Other marketers find themselves digging for a Wordpress plugin or theme that actually consistently works, or the code hack to design a landing page. If you're struggling with creating landing pages, fear not—before many of us started at Leadpages, we weren't well-versed in the subject either.

When you go to start creating your very first landing page, it's normal to feel overwhelmed. Landing page builders can feature widgets, options, integrations, icons and images. And even though many of them feature different templates to match a particular need, it can even be difficult to select the correct template to build a high-converting landing page for your specific industry.

In this chapter, we'll demystify the process of creating landing pages. We'll show you how to select the right template for your purpose, the principles of good landing page design, how to write your landing page copy (including optimizing your page with some basic SEO premises), and the five things you must have to create a landing page. Let's get started.

Watch us create and deploy a landing page in less than 10 minutes.

Watch as our educational content creator Ryan Kopperud demonstrates how we create and deploy landing page with Leadpages, live online, in less than ten minutes.

The 5 Things You Need to Start Creating Landing Pages

Before we dive into the specifics of creating landing pages, there's a few things you'll need to get started.

The purpose of your landing page.

Before you can build your page, it's essential to know why you're building it. Every element of your page relates back to the purpose it serves, so it won't make sense to start writing or designing your landing page if you don't know your page's overall goal.

A helpful way to think about this is to ask yourself, "If someone were to arrive on this page, what is the one thing I would want them to do? And why would they want to take that one action?"

This will frame the purpose of your landing page in the simplest terms give you at least a rough direction of what your page should say and look like. For example, perhaps you want to make sure people watch the video on your page (or most of the video). Or you might want to encourage people to opt in to receive your ebook in exchange for their email address. Whatever the case may be, your primary purpose should always be the starting point when creating landing pages.

Your email service provider.

It doesn't make much sense to try to start collecting people's email addresses if you don't have a way to communicate with them once you they're on your list. That's why an essential starter piece of creating landing pages is selecting an email service provider.

It's much easier to set up an email integration at the beginning of your landing page creation process. This means you can start collecting email leads from the second your landing page goes live. Your other option is to go back and link your landing pages with your email service provider later, but that's not easy or efficient. When selecting your email service provider, you'll more than likely want to select one that offers automation features—like Drip, for example.

This will give you flexibility in how you communicate with your new leads, and allow you to scale your business as you grow. That's the nice thing about most email service providers. Many offer a series of plans that grow in price and functionality as your business grows.

Get marketing automation that really works, with Drip—part of the Leadpages family.

With comprehensive email and marketing automation features for a fraction of the price of its competitors, Drip's visual campaign editor will have you converting new leads to customers in no time. See why thousands of marketers trust their email marketing and automation to Drip.

A landing page builder.

This is the software or service you'll use to build your landing pages—just like Leadpages. If you don't use a landing page builder, you will have to code your landing pages from scratch using HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc.; or pay an independent developer to build them for you. That can result in lost time and expenses for your business (particularly if you have to contact your developer each time your changes on your landing pages).

Using a landing page builder is a much faster, more cost-effective way to create your company's most important landing pages. With a landing page builder, you can create landing pages at the speed of thought. As your business changes, you can create new and different landing pages for any and every occasion. You can also continuously split test your pages to discover exactly what works for your audience.

With Leadpages, you get a visual, point-and-click simple builder with drag and drop functionality that allows you to see your page as you create it. You can adjust literally every element on your landing pages from the text and the design. You can also deploy your pages to a custom subdomain, your Wordpress site, or your Leadpages hosted subdomain and publish your page live online in minutes. Your landing pages built with Leadpages will automatically be mobile-responsive.

Landing page builders simplify everything and make your business web-ready in a matter of moments instead of hours or even days.

Your landing page copy.

This is exactly what you want your landing page to say. Your landing page copy is the words you'll use to convey what your page is offering and the value it provides to visitors. We recommend you write this copy in advance, so that you can structure your page around your written purpose. We'll discuss the details of this much more in depth during this chapter. However, the primary copy elements you'll want to consider writing in advance are:

Headline

Subheadline

Benefit bullet points

Call to action

Guarantee

When writing these copy elements, remember to keep things consistent, relevant, and specific. With only a little practice and the guidance we'll provide below, you'll be writing high-converting landing page copy in no time.

Landing page builders simplify everything and make your business web-ready in a matter of moments instead of hours or even days.

Your landing page design.

The design of your landing page should largely be taken care of by the template you choose for your page. That said, there are of course tweaks you'll want to make to personalize a landing page and make it your own. You'll want to be sure you're considering which elements to include and not include as you proceed, and make sure the template matches your landing page's purpose.

Your overall landing page design will include the visuals you use, the colors and fonts you choose, and any additional elements. For instance, are you adding a video to your landing page? Will you want multiple buttons, or just one?

Writing Your Landing Page Copy

We often hear marketers say things like:

"I'm not a copywriter—I'm not going to be able to write compelling landing page copy."

Or:

"The copy I write isn't that important… As long as I have a good offer and traffic, the rest will follow."

To which we humbly respond, "Not true! And not true!"

In the excitement of creating a landing page, the pursuit of making sales, and the myriad of other things small business owners and entrepreneurs juggle on a daily basis, writing your landing page copy often falls by the wayside. But the truth is, the copy you write is essential to the success of your landing page.

Your landing page copy allows you to communicate the importance of what you have to offer to your visitors. Your words also give you the framing you need to create a valuable and positive experience for them.

In this section we'll cover the five most common elements of landing page copy including tried and true tips on how to write copy successfully, no matter your level of proficiency. We'll give you our five best strategies to writing the best landing page copy possible, and driving more leads and sales.

Creating a Clear and Powerful Headline

When you're creating your headline, it's important to remember that you have roughly 3-5 seconds to catch your visitor's attention before that reader decides to exit your page, perhaps forever. Your headline is what keeps visitors from leaving in those 3-5 seconds. Indeed, that is not a lot of time, and that's why headlines are so important.

Headlines are at the top of your page. They're the first thing a visitor sees, and there's a very good chance your headline is the largest and clearest piece of copy on an entire page.

Once your visitor sees it, it's going to be the first indicator of whether your landing page is the place where they want to be.

Your visitors will be asking, "Is this for me? What exactly is it? And how will I benefit from it?"

That's why, in order to properly persuade your visitors to stay, your headline needs to answer these three questions:

1. What is the offering here?

It's surprising how frequently people simply don't answer this question in their headline. We've seen landing pages that say things like, "Coaching to take you to the next level." But what kind of coaching is it? Are you a life coach? A career coach? A football coach? What is the product? Is it a coaching ebook? Seminar? Webinar? 1-on-1 private calling sessions? You visitor should know exactly what can be there's if they stick around, and it should be crystal clear right away in your headline.

2. Why does my audience need what I'm offering?

People want to know what they can do once they get whatever you're offering, or how they're going to feel once they have it. Being clear on the benefit they'll receive is essential. If you can help someone increase their consulting business income by up to 300% in six months, you should tell them that in your headline. If you're going to help your visitors double their reading speed with the techniques in your videos, let them know. If your students go from barely exercising to being able to run a half-marathon in 12 weeks, spell out that benefit in your headline. Once they know your offer and what that offer will help them achieve, your visitors will be increasingly more likely to want it.

Write the best headlines you've ever written.

Download our headline "Mad Libs" to start crafting compelling headlines in a matter of minutes, and get the inspiration you need to create the best headlines you can.

3. Why is this landing page the only place they can get what you're offering?

Don't underestimate the uniqueness of being you, or the individuality of your product or service. Your headline should clearly communicate that exclusivity to your prospects. If you don't feel your offer is genuinely unique, it's time to either add to your offer or take some time to ponder the exact reasons why your offer is actually unique so you can be sure to include those reasons in your headline.

Hold Attention with a Subheadline

Most often, your subheadline will be the second most prominent piece of text on your landing page, and the next thing to catch your visitor's eye after your headline. If you have headline runners-up that didn't make the cut for your main headline, try them out as a subheadline!

This is also a perfect carryover space for ideas that were too long to fit in your headline, like why your offer is unique and exclusive. You can take several approaches to a successful and persuasive subheadline.

Here are the three ways we craft subheadlines at Leadpages, and the ways we recommend our clients write their own subheadlines

1. Intrigue visitors with a surprising metric.

If you can tease or intrigue people further with a surprising metric, your subheadline is a perfect place for that too. Numbers can be engaging proof that your offer is valuable. For example, you might tell visitors what kind of ROI they can expect in a specific timeframe by purchasing your product. You can also use social proof here if you have it (like testimonials, case studies etc.), to tell visitors how many people have done, bought, or benefited from your offer, your product, or your services.

2. Drive visitors down your page with a counterintuitive statement.

A counterintuitive statement is the exact opposite of what people would expect. It's something that puzzles your visitors in a good way. These types of states will prompt your audience to think, "Hmm… Really? Tell me more…" For instance, the following counterintuitive subheadline could support a clear, exclusive-sounding headline:

"The Last Knife You'll Ever Need: This Knife Cuts Everything from Cheese Wedges to Soda Cans, Yet It's Safe Enough for a 7-year-old to Use."

A knife that cuts anything but can be used by a child sounds counterintuitive, and makes people want to know what that might be, or how it works. Try this technique with your subheadlines when writing and do your very best to stoke their curiosity.

3. Use scarcity or a deadline to create a sense of urgency.

Once you've communicated your offer in your headline, consider adding language in your subheadline that communicates a limited time or low volume for your offer. If a visitor to your landing page already is intrigued by your headline, and your subheadline communicates a need to act fast, you can push visitors toward a call-to-action even faster.

Get the creative brief Leadpages uses to write our own landing page copy for free.

Simply open the PDF document and fill in the blanks to start crafting high-converting copy. You'll have a better grasp of the goal of your page, and a better feeling for how it will read before you build it.

When you're finished, you'll have a better grasp of the goal of your page, and a better feeling for how your page will read before you even begin to build it.

Building Fascinating Benefit Bullet Points

Bullet points are most often the meatiest part of your page. In this section, you'll have space to say more about why your offer is valuable, and exactly what visitors can expect when they purchase your product or opt in on your page.

However, studies show that when you use more words, as little as 20% of the people who see this longer copy may actually read it.

That's why you want your bullet points to be just as intriguing as your other copy, but perhaps not as essential. This is still where you add details about the what and why of your offer, but you wouldn't want to bury the most critical defining characteristic of your product or service in your third of seven bullet points.

Here are three techniques we use with an example for each:

1. A "Number" Bullet

A number bullet or statement can attract visitors with the volume of your offering. It's not necessarily about wowing people with a large number, as much as it is about creating intrigue with a relevant number. For instance, "The only 3 techniques you need…" isn't a big number, but telling a person they only need three techniques to accomplish something creates interest. Here's an example:

2. A "Why" Bullet

A why bullet or statement tells visitors you know something important that you're going to share with them. It showcases authority, because you're alluding to having figured out the cause of something that's of interest to your readers. Here's another example:

"Why Scare Tactic Copy Doesn't Always Work: You'll see where (and how) marketers go wrong with negative selling statements and how to avoid all these copywriting mistakes on your own pages."

3. A "How To" Bullet

"How to Craft Irresistibly Persuasive Headlines for Your Own Landing Pages: You'll get plug-and-play formulas you can use to start building your own irresistible headlines."

The same techniques that work in headlines and subheadlines work in bullets, too.

Try including impressive metrics, making counterintuitive statements, and proving that readers have a need that only your offer can fill.

At Leadpages, we've also found it's best to have three, five, or seven benefit bullet points. However, you should always keep your bullets concise. You don't want to delay or distract your visitors from your call to action—which we'll talk about next.

Writing High Converting Button Copy

The last mile can be the longest, and you want to make it as easy as possible for your visitor to complete the intended action on your landing page. High converting button copy is clear and specific. Often at Leadpages, we find that the most persuasive button copy is often written in the first person. For example, things like:

Send me the free gardening ebook now!

I'm ready for my private sushi-making webinar!

Give me the 12-part video course!

Your button copy is that final chance to encourage people to take action on your page. It's also your last opportunity to show visitors you have what they're looking for. To do that, you need a strong, consistent message, from the first ad they've seen to this final call to action. Remember, even though a call-to-action button will mostly likely be the last item on your page, it doesn't mean it's the only location it will be. More often than not, you'll also want a button with your persuasive copy above the fold of your page, so visitors can see it as soon as they land on your page.

Reversing Risk with Guarantees

Writing a guarantee on your landing page is all about giving your visitors a parachute. It's a way to tell your audience:

"Hey! There's no big risk here! Go ahead and click that button! You've got nothing to worry about! It's going to be awesome if you take me up on this offer, and if you don't think it is awesome, I'll make sure you're no worse for wear!"

But remember, a guarantee doesn't always mean you're giving people their money back. A guarantee can be a refund, but it can also be a guaranteed replacement of a product, or simply a guaranteed offer to resolve any complaint someone might have, until they're fully satisfied.

Even lighter flavors of a guarantee can simply let your visitors know that their credit card information will be 100% secure with you, or that you respect their privacy and would never spam them.

Final Thoughts on Writing Landing Page Copy

If you're looking for more information and learning how to get better at writing your landing page copy, check out these resources:

Landing Page SEO Basics

When it comes to landing page search engine optimization (SEO), we're mostly talking about making Google happy with the experience you provide your visitors. That means both with the words you write and the experience you create on your landing page. With over 70% of the global search market, Google makes regular changes to their search algorithm to ensure that websites are delivering the optimal experience for any given visitor.

While there are thousands of factors taken into consideration, search engines across the board will essentially look for the relevance and quality of the content found on a landing page to determine how high to rank it. Whether you're looking to rank your landing pages highly, or simply create a great experience for your visitors, learning SEO basics is an essential part of creating landing pages.

Writing Naturally

Most people know that search engines look for the presence of keywords on a page to determine what to rank them for. But just because keywords are present doesn't necessarily mean Google will value them equitably. The most important thing to remember when optimizing your landing page for search engines is to write naturally. Don't repeat keywords over and over in sentences just to try to rank those words, and don't write unnaturally long paragraphs that provide more keywords in them than actual value. Write in your own voice, write well, and write naturally, and your landing page will already be perceived as more optimal than many found online.

New to SEO? We created a free checklist to help you get started.

If you or someone on your team could use a handy refresher course for on-page SEO—we're giving away our very own Getting Started checklist. It's all based on the best practices we use here at Leadpages (and you're going to love it). Click below to get yours.

Conveying Value

Search engines want to rank content that is perceived as valuable by users. If you're looking for something online, you want to find that thing—and hopefully the best version of that thing you can find. Make sure that the copy you write for your page conveys the value of someone being there and clearly articulates why your page exists. Value and length of copy aren't inherently linked, but also remember that if you have only a few sentences and one button on your page, search engines simply won't regard it as a valuable piece of content that should rank highly.

Relevancy and Consistency

Relevancy and consistency are paramount when it comes to SEO for your landing pages. Make sure that the copy you write for your page matches what a visitor would expect to see when they get there, and keep the content consistent throughout.

For example, it's not a good practice to have a landing page that talks about a wide variety of things. If you're a professional life coach but you also own your own plumbing business, you wouldn't want to talk about those two businesses on the same landing page. That lack of consistency makes it hard for search engines to understand the purpose and value of a page, which won't bode well for high rankings.

Creating a Positive User Experience

Another essential element of good search engine optimization for your landing pages is making it easy for users to understand your landing page and execute the intended behavior. A bad user experience is confusing, complicated, busy, and aesthetically unpleasing. Try to avoid those pitfalls by making a landing page that is easy to follow. To create an aesthetically pleasing and simple to execute landing page, try to use as few colors and fonts as necessary.

A final note on SEO: It's important to distinguish whether you want to rank your landing pages for organic traffic or other traffic from alternative sources (like paid media). Both of these are options, but it's essential to remember that ranking a single landing page can be extremely difficult. Search engine algorithms are wary of single pages when it comes to ranking highly. That being said, all of the tips in this section will make for higher quality landing pages, and create a better experience for your visitor, regardless of whether or not search engines decide to rank them highly.

Landing Page Design

At Leadpages, we often hear the same things about designing landing pages as we do about writing copy for them. Things like:

"I'm not a designer—I'll never be able to make a page that both looks good and converts well."

Or:

"The design of my landing page doesn't really matter. As long as all the information my visitors need is there, they'll sort it out."

And once again, to this we humbly respond, "Not true! And not true!"

The nice thing about landing page design is that every builder should offer you a plethora of good-looking and high-converting options to select from when building your landing pages. Unlike landing page copy, your landing page design will usually have a great starting point. That being said, there are definitely some best practices to keep in mind as you continue to tweak your page, and make it your own.

Free Podcast: 9 Marketing Design Tips for Non-Designers

Ready to learn more about landing page design? Check out this podcast episode, where we'll help you break down what looks good—and converts better—in landing page design. (Hint: This podcast is for marketers who don't consider themselves to be designers, and features 9 fast and easy tips.)

Keep It Simple

Leonardo Da Vinci once said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." But we have good news...

You don't have to be a legendary artist to make good landing page design decisions.

A smart way to think about this is to ask yourself, "Do I really need this?" as you're adding elements throughout your page. If you find yourself adding icons or text blocks just for the sake of adding more to your page, or to fill up an existing content block, then you're probably overdoing it.

Adopt the truism "less is more"and remember that if it's not adding to your page, then it's detracting. Too many icons, text chunks, pictures, and buttons just overly complicate a page and will inevitably distract your visitors from executing your call to action.

Use of a Color Palette

Too few colors, too many colors, or colors that simply don't look good together are all easy mistakes to make. Thankfully, there are many tools online that make it easy for non-designers to get ahold of a solid colors palette. These sites help you find a color palette with colors that complement each other, and would look good adjacent to each other on a landing page you want to create.

Whatever you do, try to keep your landing page to three colors or less. Adding four or more colors to your landing page can start to make your page visually difficult to follow and unappealing to look at. Three complementary colors—usually one light, one dark, and one medium—will make for a clean and professional landing page design. With a hexadecimal color code selector in Leadpages, you can also be sure that your landing pages match seamlessly with your company's brand and your website.

Make Smart Font Choices

Even though landing page builders like Leadpages feature a variety of web-based fonts to match the design of your page, it's essential to try not to use all your favorite fonts on one single landing page. It's also essential to try not to use too many sizes of fonts, either.

A best practice is to choose two fonts at a maximum and three sizes of each at a maximum. Two fonts can complement each other while adding diversity to your page, but adding more can make your page begin to appear chaotic. The same applies to your font sizes. Three font sizes can help guide the eye through different sections and elements of your landing page, but any more than three and it can become hard for your visitors to know what to read and when.

Use White Space

Many non-designers see space and view it as an empty place that should be filled right away. This, however, is a choice to be avoided.

In fact, studies have found that an increased use of space on a page can increase a visitor's comprehension of the page content by up to 20%.

It's important to use space on your page in order to help your visitors separate items from each other and focus on what's next on the page. If every square inch of real estate on your landing page is covered with images icons and text, your page will become far too busy to comprehend and look at.

Add Imagery

There's a variety of research online suggesting that adding images to landing pages—specifically images of people—can increase the conversion rate of that page. This isn't to say that adding images to landing pages is a universal rule. However, adding images to pages can make them both more attractive to visitors, and can potentially impact conversion rates.

Experiment with using imagery to improve your landing page design by incorporating related stock photography into your header or further down sections of your page.

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Using Landing Page Templates

Most landing page templates are designed with a purpose in mind, and the template itself as well of the title of the page are created to match.

For example, any landing page builder worth its salt will have a variety of the following types of page templates:

Webinar Registration Pages

Splash Pages (aka Lead Generation or Opt-in Pages)

Video Pages

Sales Pages

Welcome Gate Pages

Resource Pages

Etc.

You want to be sure you're matching the template you select with the purpose of your page. Don't try to fit a square peg in a round hole, by selecting a random template and trying to over-design it to match your needs. Choosing a solid landing page template is the best way to ensure your landing page design is up to snuff with today's standards.

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Top 5 Mistakes People Make When Creating Landing Pages

When you first begin making landing page, it's normal to make some mistakes. We still make mistakes when creating our landing pages (that's why testing your landing page is the next chapter in this guide). But if you can avoid a few common pitfalls in the beginning, you will set yourself up for success.

To help you best accomplish this, we've outlined the five most common mistakes we see when people create their landing pages for the first time to help you avoid them as you proceed.

An Unclear Offer

One of the most frequent mistakes we see people make when they start creating landing pages is having an unclear offer. If you want someone to give you their email address, they need to know what they stand to gain if they give it to you. The same is true if you want someone to register for your webinar or purchase your product. Your offer needs to be absolutely crystal clear. Don't be awkwardly repetitive. Don't be ambiguous, and don't offer something of little-to-no value.

Too Much Content

If your page has too much going on, visitors will have a difficult time figuring out how to respond to your page. There's no perfect amount of content for a landing page, but very long, complicated, and busy landing pages are not likely to convert.. That's because with every added element, a visitor has one more distraction from clicking your call-to-action and opting into your page. As always, test your pages for length, but try to reduce the content on your landing page to only essential elements. Good rule: If an element is not helping your visitors towards a conversion, it's detracting from it.

A Confusing Call To Action

It's difficult to get someone to do the thing you want the most, if you give your visitors multiple things to do on any given landing page.

In other words, if you give your audience 10 steps to potentially take instead of one on your landing page, they're less likely to take the single step that matters most. That's why you should have as few calls-to-action as possible on your landing pages—preferably one.

Also, make sure that your first call-to-action is placed above the fold on your landing pages. This means your visitors can see your first call to action when they first land on your page, without having to scroll.

Unprofessional Look and Feel

People are unlikely to do business with people they don't trust—and trustworthy companies appear professional. If your pages don't look professional, they won't appear trustworthy, and people may be reluctant to do business with you. Stick to predesigned templates that work for your business and look good to you, and always try to emulate professional pages you enjoy. If you've seen it out there in the wild from a marketer you respect, there's a good chance a similar design could work for you too. You can always click here to see our Roundups on the Leadpages blog. These are posts that cover the best looking and most functional Leadpages and Leadboxes that are made by our customers every month or so. Use them for inspiration to create even better landing pages when designing your own.

In Conclusion

Once you get the hang of it, creating landing pages can truly be both fun and easy. The better you get at it, the higher your conversion rate will inevitably climb. Take time writing, and emulate other sales and landing pages that have been compelling to you in the past. Do the same for your landing page design. Start with a solid and user-friendly template, and make changes that enhance the page or make it appear similar to pages that you've appreciated in the past. Over time, your skill will grow, and you'll know how to build a high-converting landing page each and every time.

Now that you know exactly how to start creating your landing pages, we'll talk about optimizing them and driving traffic to them next, in the following chapter of The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages.

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Optimize Each Page For Maxiumum Wow

Once you've finished creating a landing page you're proud of, you probably have a deep sense of satisfaction. And you should! It's well-earned.

The work that you've put in on the front-end will continue to pay dividends as you generate more leads and customers. Right now, you're probably thinking, "Onward to success!" And that success will indeed come.

When you go to start creating your very first landing page, it's normal to feel overwhelmed. Landing page builders can feature widgets, options, integrations, icons and images. And even though many of them feature different templates to match a particular need, it can even be difficult to select the correct template to build a high-converting landing page for your specific industry.

But the most important element of achieving that success—that we haven't covered so far—is the process of optimizing your landing pages through the use of testing. Landing page optimization and conversion rate optimization are so important, because slight changes on a single landing page can dramatically impact your conversion rates. That affects your long-term results, and inevitably the revenue for your business.

No matter how you're driving traffic to your landing pages, you're working for it. Whether it's through content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, or paid advertising, you're going through a lot of effort to get eyes on your landing pages.

Now just imagine if that same amount of traffic—that same amount of money and effort you're investing—generated even more leads and sales than you're seeing right now.

Sounds pretty good, right?

That's exactly what landing page optimization is for. If you can squeeze a 1% improvement into your conversion rate, just be making some tweaks to your landing page, that's 10 more customers out of every 1000 visits your page gets. Add more traffic and those numbers climb even higher. And who wouldn't want that?

In this chapter of The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages, we're going to talk about the basics of landing page testing and conversion rate optimization. It's not as scientific as it might sound, and it's certainly not difficult. If anything, it's exciting to start planning and working towards small changes you can try that just might produce big results for your business.

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Conversion Rate Definition

To begin, it's important to agree on our universal definition of what a conversion rate is.

Your conversion rate is the best measurement of success for any landing page you create. It's also relatively simple. Conversion rate is measured by dividing the number of visitors to your page who took action on your landing page, by the total number of visitors to your page.

So for example: if 3,000 people visited your landing page, and 450 people signed up to attend your webinar, then your conversion rate would be 15%.

450 Conversions ÷ 3,000 Total Visitors = 15% Conversion Rate

Knowing what your conversion rate is will help you know exactly how effective your landing page is. It'll also be the barometer you'll use to improve the quality and effectiveness of your landing page over time.

At Leadpages, we often get asked, "Is my conversion rate good?" or "What does a good conversion rate even look like?"

Unfortunately, there's no single good answer for this question. That's because there's no standard baseline for what a "good" conversion rate is. Conversion rates can heavily fluctuate based on a wide variety of factors, like the type of traffic you're driving to your page, the price point of the product you're selling, your content or design—to name a few.

But regardless of the exact number of your current conversion rate, almost every landing page can benefit from conversion rate optimization. What is conversion rate optimization? Well, in it's simplest form, conversion rate optimization is about using intentionally iterative testing to improve the effectiveness of your landing pages.

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing—also often called split testing—is one of the most common forms of testing done in marketing. That's partially because it's also one of the most simple. A/B testing occurs when two landing pages, web pages, or emails are pitted against each other, in a bout to see which one is more effective in getting users to take a desired action.

An A/B test is accomplished by creating two separate versions of a landing page, web page, or email, that differ slightly in one specific area, and sending an equal portion of your traffic to each version. Once a representative population of users has been driven to both Option A and Option B over a long enough period of time, the version with the higher conversion rate is determined to be the winner in the A/B test. At Leadpages we declare a winner when one version of your page outperforms the other by over 90%, which helps determine that a winning result is not due to chance.

Often, A/B testing is done in succession, one after the next, in order to continue testing different specific elements of a particular page or email. This sequential optimization is a process, but it's one well worth it. Untested and ineffective landing pages can yield 1-2% conversion rates, while tested, optimized, and effective landing pages can perform exponentially better. Sometimes, in cases of 10-50% conversion rates, or even higher.

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What is multivariate testing?

Multivariate testing is similar to A/B testing, in that it allows you to see how effective pages or emails are in comparison to each other. The difference though, is exposed in the title—multivariate testing has multiple versions, more than just an A and B version, allowing for more diverse testing.

Multivariate testing is more like A/B/C/D/E testing, where you can create many versions that will test a variety of elements on your pages or emails—and eventually a winner will emerge. While more complex than A/B testing to set up and execute, one of the benefits of multivariate testing is you can vett many versions of a landing page or email in a shorter amount of time. This in turn, allows you to arrive at the best iteration of your content even faster.

What can be tested on a landing page?

The fastest and easiest answer to, "What can be tested on a landing page?" is really: "Anything you want." It seems nonspecific, but it's true. It may not always lead to an increase in your conversion rate, but essentially, you can test almost everything you can see on your landing page.

As you envision ways to improve your conversion rate, consider these ideas when it comes to elements of the page you'd like to put to the test. Remember, a few optimizations of just one or two of these elements on your landing pages can pay out huge dividends over time.

Landing Page Copy

What you say, and the way you say it, can be interpreted differently by different people. This is especially true when it comes to the written word. That's why one of our favorite things at Leadpages to test is our landing page copy. In fact, the first thing we usually test here in our headlines. We love finding new ways to describe offers, and seeing how different language resonates with our landing page visitors.

When you're evaluating your own landing page copy, ask yourself:

Could my headline be more enticing?

Is there a way to write out my offer so that it's more clear?

Should I add more text explaining why my offer is so valuable?

If I wrote a guarantee somewhere on my page, would visitors feel more comfortable taking action and responding to my offer?

These questions can give you a good place to start when you're looking to A/B test your own landing page copy, to discover which words are most effective.

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Landing Page Images

At Leadpages, we love to use images on our landing pages. For example, when we're hosting a webinar, we're excited to show you photos of the real people you'll be hearing from during these online trainings. In a similar way, we tend to add images to our opt-in, sales, or video pages.

There's a good reason for that. Landing pages that use images properly are often more aesthetically pleasing, provide a better experience for your visitors, and inspire visitors to take action and respond to offers.

Whether you use pictures of real people, images of scenery that match your product, business, style, and aesthetic, or icons and logos, imagery is often a solid addition to any landing page. That's also what makes images worthy of testing.

Think of it this way: if it's worth adding to your page at all, it's probably worth testing different iterations of it. Different imagery can be effective for different audiences, so you'll want to experiment, of course. However, we've found something as simple as changing a bio photo that expresses a different emotion can impact conversion rates.

That said, always be willing to add, remove, change, expand, or contract the imagery you're using on a landing page. You never know how it might affect the conversion rate of your landing page.

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Landing Page Buttons

Any marketer who has experimented with web pages or landing pages wishes there was a perfect call-to-action button in the world. That single shape and copy combination that would elevate conversion rates and get the sale every time.

Unfortunately, that perfect combination doesn't exist—at least not universally, anyway. But you can find the ideal optimized call-to-action button for your specific audience if you test enough buttons for your particular landing pages.

While we can't give you the perfect recipe for the ultimate button, we recommend changing and testing the elements of your own buttons as you optimize your landing pages.

Button Color - While color is a topic of contention, in terms of its effect on conversion rates, it is true that buttons that stand out more will often receive more attention, and can drive better conversions. Try adjusting colors when testing, and see if you can create attractive buttons that also stand out from the page.

Button Size - Similarly to changing button colors to attract attention,, you can also change the size of your button to ensure it's easily noticeable to your visitors. But be careful with your button sizes. Too big and your buttons may seem overwhelming. Too small and your buttons may be missed. Consider testing different button size options to arrive on the one that connects best with your audience.

Button Text - The actual text on your button is the last thing your visitors will read before they decide to take action on your landing page—or they don't. That means this text is definitely worth testing. At Leadpages, we recommend using text that reminds visitors of what they stand to gain if they click.

Button Shape - The shape of your button will likely have the least impact on your conversion rate. However, you can still try out different shapes like buttons with squared corners, rounded corners, or fully circular sides creating a pill shape.

Landing Page Colors

In the world of marketing, web design, and conversion rate optimization, there's an ongoing debate surrounding how much color actually affects conversion rates. Reason being, some people argue that color psychology plays a big role in a user's experience on your landing page.

Other people think using complementary colors, and different colors to make page elements stand out, is the only way that color really impacts conversion rates.

We're not here to argue either side, as much as we're here to say: give both a shot.

For example, if you test a green header on your landing page versus a red header, and the red header converts 20% better in an A/B test —great! You just proved that a red header is optimal on that specific page, for your specific audience (at this time). That doesn't mean you should use red headers on every landing page from now on. It means you should keep testing and see what works for individual pages.

Be pragmatic about color use. Essentially, just make your landing page appealing to look at and test color usage over time. If there are noticeable conversion rate increases based on changes in color that you've sufficiently tested, then good for you! Go with them!

Landing Page Length

Another testable part of your page is the overall length. This isn't just about the copy that you've written for your landing page. It's also about the elements you choose to keep or remove.

For example, many studies have concluded that adding customer testimonials to a landing page give visitors higher levels of confidence and they tend to take action on your page. But we've also seen case studies where removing customer testimonials, creating a shorter page, has also increased conversion rates.

The best length for a landing page can also depend on what you're offering. For example, if you're giving away a free ebook in exchange for someone's email address, you may just need a headline and some short copy. If you're selling an in-depth coaching program at a much higher price point, you may need more copy, visuals, descriptions, videos, testimonials, etc.

Page length can also depends on your audience too and how well they know you, and how much they're aware of what you're offering prior to seeing your landing page. Their degree of familiarity can greatly change the best length for your page.

Again, there is no one-size-fits-all recommendation here. It's just important to note that increasing or decreasing the amount of content and the number of elements on your landing pages can affect your conversion rate. And that means, it's worth testing.

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The 5 Steps to a Successful Landing Page Test

Now that we've got a solid definition of what your conversion rate is, examples of common landing page tests, and some ideas of what can and should be tested on your landing pages, let's talk about executing a test.

The steps of a successful landing page test is a lot like the steps of the scientific method. If you've forgotten that particular section of middle school science (as I certainly had) the scientific method essentially goes like this:

Have a question you want to investigate.

Create a hypothesis related to your question.

Complete an experiment that will test your hypothesis.

Gather data from your test, communicate your results, and repeat.

Whether this general framework is being applied to scientific research or towards improving your landing pages, the intention is the same.

Decide one thing you want to change, successfully test only that one thing, and then apply what you learn from that test.

Let's dive deeper into each of these elements for the exact steps you should take to create a successful landing page test.

1. Ask a question.

To begin testing a landing page, it's important to start by objectively asking questions about it. Even if you've just finished building your landing page and put a lot of work into the copy and the design, it's essential to remember that it can always get better.

Probing your landing page with general and increasingly more specific questions is a fantastic way to start improving your page. For example:

What might a first-time visitor not understand when they land on my page?

What if I tested a different headline that offers more information?

What if I added a picture of myself (or other people) to this page?

What would happen if I swapped out the background colors?

What if I added a countdown timer to my page?

What would happen if I changed the color of my call-to-action buttons?

What if I changed the text on my call-to-action buttons?

What would happen if I added testimonials?

These general, but increasingly focused, questions will give you ways to think differently about your landing page. Ask as many questions as you can. The more you ask, the more you'll see trends in what you think can be tested. And this will prepare you to create your hypothesis—which is coming up next.

2. Make a hypothesis.

Once you've asked enough questions, it's time to select one that you believe you can test, and will benefit you most. Then, you'll create a hypothesis from that question. You can only truly test one thing on your landing page at a time.

Why is that? Well, if you put two completely different landing pages up against each other in an A/B test, one will inevitably perform better than the other. However, if these pages have a variety of different elements, such as different images, different copy, and different colors, then it's impossible to know which element (or elements) made one page perform better than the other.

That's why your hypothesis should revolve around one specific element of your page, and what you think you can change to make it convert better. For instance:

I believe my page will convert better if my headline were more specific, and included my limited time discount in it.

I believe my page will convert better if my buttons are purple instead of the yellow color of my headline text.

I believe my page will convert better if I remove the distant picture of the coffee shop and add a smiling picture of someone drinking coffee instead.

Remember, you can test as many hypotheses as you want—just not at the same time. Pick one hypothesis you think will be beneficial, and then get ready to execute your test.

3. Execute a test.

This can be both the difficult and easy part of optimizing your conversion rate. It can be challenging because you must decide specifically what elements to test against each other. However, depending on your split testing tool, this can also be a simple process to set up. For example, if you're using a landing page builder like Leadpages, it's easy to create this kind of split test in minutes.

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4. Determine a winner.

Most often, the tool you're using to A/B test your landing pages should make it clear which option is the winner, after you achieve statistical significance Essentially, statistical significance just means that your A/B test has been running long enough and enough people have seen your landing page, that the results not the result of a sampling error or a random outcome.

There are some very complex ways of projecting and measuring this mathematically, but you more than likely don't need to delve too deeply into the actual equations. Over anything else, you'll need to exercise some patience and prepare to select a winner.

5. Rinse and repeat.

You did it! You've improved your landing page! You have a better version now than the one you started with. Next, you'll want to start the process over again. Each time you execute a test, you're adding more leads and sales to your business, so you'll want to rinse and repeat as often as many times as is valuable for your landing page.

Take your improved landing page that won your last test, create a new hypothesis, execute a test, wait until you see statistical significance, and then start again. This process does take time and traffic, but just remember, with each iteration your marketing gets better and better and you're becoming that much more successful each time.

5 Common Conversion Rate Optimization Mistakes

Now that you have a framework in place to help you go forth and test your landing pages, we hope you're raring to go. But if you're new to conversion rate optimization, and you haven't done many landing page tests before, you're going to make some mistakes. But don't worry—this is entirely normal!

Just look at each mistake as a learning opportunity and keep on testing.

If you want to avoid some of the testing faux pas we've learned over the years, read through this list of five common conversion rate optimization mistakes, so you can do your best to avoid them.

1. Testing Too Many Things at Once

In their excitement to create the best landing page possible, people have been known to try testing too many things at once. This is often easy to do, because "testing too much at once" involves testing any more than one element at a time. The reason for this is, as we briefly mentioned before, you won't know which element did or didn't affect your conversion rate.

For example, let's say you create a version A of your landing page. Then you create a version B of that page with a different CTA button color and shorter headline. If version B ends up performing better than version A, you won't know which of those two changes was responsible for any fluctuations you see in your conversion rate.

That's why we absolutely recommend only testing one thing at a time. That way, you can establish the impact of that single, specific thing on your conversion rate, before moving onto the next landing page element you want to test.

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2. Not Waiting Long Enough

This goes back to our section on statistical significance from earlier. Sometimes it can be hard to have the patience required to fully see your test through until you reach statistical significance and can declare a winner. If you're doing an A/B test before running a big PPC ad campaign, it might be tempting to see a slight lift in conversion rate for version A and immediately crown it your winner, so you can get on with your big campaign. Doing this, however, is a big mistake.

Never jump the gun on an A/B test. Once you've gone through all the necessary steps of asking questions, creating a hypothesis, building a new page, and actually executing a test, you owe it to yourself to see the test through and make sure your results are fully representative.

Even though you might be tempted to end the test when version A or version B of your test starts pulling ahead, make sure you wait. Keep in mind: Just like in a horse race,the final winner isn't always the version that was leading in the beginning.

If you avoid this mistake, you can ensure that your conversion rate will continue to climb with each new test because you know your results are as real as it gets.

3. Going Too Small

Even though you can run as many tests on a page as you want over time, you'll want to see real improvements in your page with every test. That's why it's important to always test significant page elements.

When testing landing pages, some people are afraid to kill their conversion rate by testing a larger element of their page. They think, "What if this change is so big, it ruins the conversion rate I already have?" Because of this, they'll change only very minimal, less consequential elements, like the color of a footer, a few words here and there, the size of an icon, etc. But these things won't likely have sizable effects on your conversion rate.

Even though we're big proponents of trying all kinds of tests, big and small, make sure that your hypothesis and the changes you're going to make are worth the effort it takes to run a test. That leads us to the next mistake.

4. Being Afraid to Be Wrong

When testing a hypothesis, you are going to be wrong sometimes. It happens! At Leadpages, we A/B test every single one of our landing pages as well as most of the pages on our website. The hypotheses we test are often wrong—but being wrong is good! That's just another point in your dataset that you can use to continue improving your landing pages.

People who are afraid to make a mistake won't make progress. Their changes will be minimal and inconsequential. At Leadpages, we recommend you ask big questions, use data to make big hypotheses, make big changes, and then test big things. Doing all of these things can get you big results. Don't get us wrong—sometimes small changes can also have big impacts, but you'll never know if you're too afraid to be wrong, that you don't make big changes at all.

Continue being wrong and you'll inevitably get better at being right. Each time that happens, your landing pages will improve along with your conversion rates. Improved conversion rates means more leads, more conversions, and more revenue for your business.

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5. Only Doing One Test

As we've mentioned previously in this chapter, conversion rate optimization is about iteration. If you do one A/B test and find that page A has a higher conversation rate than page B, that's great news. But the process of optimizing your landing pages doesn't end after one test. If you don't continue to test, you're more than likely missing out on incremental percentage points that you could gain on your conversion rate.

At Leadpages, it's not uncommon for us to A/B test different iterations of a single page five or more times. The reason we keep doing it, is because we know it's working, and we get a little better every single time. Even though it requires some work, that continuous improvement is worth the time and effort.

Conclusion

Creating high quality landing pages doesn't stop after you've hit publish for the first time. Testing your landing pages is an essential part of a successful marketing campaign. The more you do it, the better you'll get at it. Remember, every test you execute is successful, because even if your hypothesis turns out to not be true, you've still learned something. You have a new data point that you can use when you go to create your next landing page.

Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Just pick an element of your landing page that you feel could be better, and envision what that looks like. When you're right, and your page improves, so will your conversion rate. And the work you put into creating your landing page will pay back exponential dividends when you put in the work to continue optimizing it, one test at a time.

Now that you know exactly how to start testing your landing pages, and optimizing that conversion rate, we're going to talk about what it takes to get more eyes on your landing pages. Driving traffic is up next, where we'll learn the exact methods you need to get more people on your pages, and create more leads and sales. That's coming up next in the following chapter of The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages.

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Leadpages is the number one landing page builder in the world. With over 40,000 customers, and billions of visits to the landing pages that've been built by our clients, we've learned a lot about lead generation and growing small business—and we're excited to share that knowledge with you.

Even though we've covered a lot, we've got two more chapters left in The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages. In this fifth chapter, we're talking about the final, and potentially most essential, ingredient to generating leads and sales with your landing pages: web traffic.

Without eyes on your landing pages, you won't have visitors to convert into leads. Without leads, you won't have anyone to convert into customers. You can have the most attractive offer, at the best price point, on the best written and designed landing page, in the entire world—but if there aren't any people visiting your landing page, then your business simply won't be making any money.

Coming up, we'll discuss a variety of tactics you can start implementing today, that will increase your web traffic and put more eyes on your landing pages. Some of these tactics work if you already have a built-in audience for your website, blog, or landing pages, while others are designed for businesses that are starting to drive web traffic for the first time.

Whether or not you already have a built-in group of people who are excited about your brand, your content, or the products you have to offer, you'll benefit from the traffic-driving methods and strategies we're about to cover.

Let's dive in.

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The Three B's of Driving Web Traffic

Web traffic is valuable—mostly because it's hard to get. With well-over one billion websites on the internet today, getting—and keeping—the attention of people requires money, effort, or a combination of the two.

This is especially true when it comes to creating landing pages. Creating a single, one-off landing page, and simply releasing it online will very rarely lead to organic traffic finding your page. Without some strategies and tactics to get eyes on those pages, you won't be getting leads either.

So in this chapter, we'll cover the three B's of driving that all-important website traffic to your landing pages. Each section of this chapter is dedicated to the the three top-level ways that people drive web traffic. Beneath each, we'll discuss over 10 total individual strategies that you can start implementing right now. The three B's themselves are: Buying, Borrowing, and Building website traffic. We'll start with the most expensive, but also often most effective, method of driving traffic: buying it.

Buying Web Traffic

The fastest and most targeted website traffic you can find is the traffic you can buy. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are worth billions of dollars because they sell advertising that drives traffic, leads, and sales. Part of the reason these ads are so successful is that they can be created and targeted off of the myriad pieces of demographic information these companies have on their users. Businesses and marketers keep buying those ads for a good reason—because they work.

If you want website traffic as soon as possible, from people who you know already have interests similar to your products and services, it's probably time to open your wallet.

But don't worry—you don't have to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars a year to get a steady stream of visitors. Depending on who you're targeting and what you're selling, as little as $5 a day can get send targeted users to your website or landing page.

So now, let's look at how you should (and shouldn't) go about buying web traffic right now.

Do Buy PPC Advertising

Most social media or search companies have well-refined platforms that make it easy to create ads, find the right audiences, and track how effective your ads actually are. Different PPC advertising networks have different advantages and disadvantages, and it's worth testing at least a few to figure out which one is best for your business.

Most social media or search companies have well-refined platforms that make it easy to create ads, find the right audiences, and track how effective your ads actually are. Different PPC advertising networks have different advantages and disadvantages, and it's worth testing at least a few to figure out which one is best for your business.

There are of course many more ad services in the online universe than just these. But if your goal is to reach people with targeted advertising, and you're willing to take some time to create and test ads, all of the above advertising platforms will absolutely drive targeted traffic to your website or landing pages.

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Do Buy Sponsorships

Sponsorships come in all shapes and sizes, and can also be an effective method of driving website traffic. Sometimes individuals and organizations will put out a call requesting sponsors, while in other situations, you'll need to do some digging to find contact information, and offer to sponsor specific opportunities.

Here are a few examples of potential sponsorship ideas:

Blog Sponsorships: Reach out to a blog, and ask to sponsor a blog post, a set of blog posts, or purchase a banner that links back to your site for a set period of time.

Podcast Sponsorships: Podcast advertising is on the rise. Find a podcast that matches well with your products or services, and reach out to purchase a 15 or 30 second ad read on their show.

Event Sponsorships: Whether online or in-person, an event that matches the goals of your business can be ripe with sponsorship opportunities. Event sponsorship information is usually easy to find, with a range of options.

Whatever you do, make sure you participate in sponsorships that make the most sense for your brand. Think about the brands, businesses, and individuals that have an audience that would be most likely to become a customer of yours.

Be judicious about what you're willing to sponsor, as often sponsorships are often more expensive one-time payments, than ongoing PPC advertising.

Don't Buy Traffic From Online Traffic Services

There are many online services and websites that sell "web traffic" to a specified website or landing page you provide them. We strongly recommend you avoid these services at all costs. Many of these services claim to be legitimate, easy, cheap, and send non-bots (a.k.a. real people) to your website.

Unfortunately these claims can be at worst flat-out false, and at best, impossible to substantiate. Purchasing this type of traffic can be detrimental to your Google rankings, the value of your data and analytics, and your actual business as a whole.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is—100 real human beings on your website a day for only $5? Too good to be true. You might see a spike in your analytics if you do embrace this practice, but it's more than likely robots, or click farms in a foreign country, than real people seeing your pages. Also, in the long run, your success will suffer for doing it. We keep this method of driving traffic at the top of our no-no list.

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Borrowing Web Traffic

It's time to put away your wallet, and break out the elbow grease. The next popular method for driving web traffic, is to borrow it.

Now, the word "borrowing" is just the slightest bit misleading, because once you borrow traffic, you won't necessarily be giving it back. However, the idea here is to collaborate with people, businesses, organizations, or publications that already have web traffic, in hopes that they can (and want to) send some of those people to you.

It's important to note here, that borrowing web traffic requires a lot more work and perseverance than the aforementioned methods. There's no corner-cutting and no fast lane. That said, the organic traffic that can come from associating yourself with a solid brand, company, or individual can be valuable and long-lasting, if done right.

There are many ways that marketers do this. Here, we'll talk about four of the most popular and common ways people get traffic to their websites and landing pages, by borrowing it from those who already have it.

Guest Blogging

What is it?

A simple but effective method of borrowing website traffic is writing a blog post for another person, business, or publication's blog. If you can position yourself as an authority, share a unique insight, and/or demonstrate your expertise, you can also give this other blog's readers an opportunity explore what it is that you have to offer.

Why should you do it?

Guest blogging is like being able to offer your new ice cream flavor inside of someone else's already-popular ice cream store. You get the chance to put yourself in front of people who already like ice cream, and you get to show them your flavor. Blog posts like this also will help you with link-building—a beneficial SEO tactic that we'll talk about briefly in the next section.

How do you do it?

Ask! At Leadpages, we live by the mantra: "It never hurts to ask." Find the right contact information, or ask someone else to point you in the right direction. Send an email that pitches the post you want to write for them and why you're the person to do it.

The worst thing that happens is they say no, or your request goes unanswered. Either way, you're no worse off than you were before.

When you're guest blogging you should always include a link to your best landing page that gives away your most valuable lead magnet. Ideally, if the guest publication allows, you could include a Leadbox inside your post that builds your list.

Even if writing isn't your strong suit, this doesn't have to be an idea you shy away from. Making requests like these takes repetition and persistence, but getting a guest blog post in a place you're proud of will be worth the work.

Co-Hosted Webinars

What is it?

Offering to co-host a webinar is very similar to guest blogging, but it relies on a very different skillset. Find a friend or expert in your field and co-host a webinar with them about a topic of mutual interest to their audience and yours (or your desired audience).

Why should you do it?

Co-hosting a webinar will give your name and brand new publicity, and will continue to associate your name and brand with another person who already has an established audience. Similarly to guest blogging, you'll also be building links back to your website.

How do you do it?

Keep in mind that co-hosting a webinar takes more dynamic interaction and report with your co-host. Because of this, it can be more time-intensive, and require a better actual relationship with the person you're requesting to co-host with. If you already work with someone who you're closer with, they may be a better option for co-hosting a webinar.

If you don't have anyone that fits this bill, offer to co-host a webinar that you already do. Your co-host can introduce you to their audience, you can take care of all the content. This can help mitigate the necessity of knowing the other host well, and working back and forth during the webinar itself.

Again, you may need to make many requests over time to find the right person, but the way to do this is just ask. Reach out with an idea for a webinar, when you might do it, how you intend to drive audience members, and why you're the person to do it. Repeat until success is had!

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Requesting Reviews

What is it?

Reach out to a person, organization, or publication with an audience that you respect and ask them to review a free sample of your product or service. Be sure the influencer you're contacting has done reviews of similar products or services in the past. In exchange for your free sample offering, you can request a review or testimonial, from that influencer to their audience.

For example, say you're selling all-natural homemade soaps. You could reach out to a variety of natural product sites, offer to send the some samples of your soaps, and request that they review them or write a blog post after using your product.

Why should you do it?

This can be an effective way of getting more eyes on what you do by borrowing traffic from an influencer with an audience—one who can vouch for the validity of your offer. If the influencer you've approached has a larger or different audience than you, your brand will also benefit from their support and hopefully positive words.

How do you do it?

It can be intimidating to put yourself out there, but once again, you simply have to ask. Search Google and YouTube for reviews of products or services that are similar to yours, find the contact information of the people doing the reviews, and ask them to review your product and link back to it in exchange for your free offering.

The more people you ask, the more likely you'll get an influencer to agree to review your suggested product or service. With a review and links back to your business, people will be much more likely to become part of your audience too. You can even use this strategy to begin an affiliate program. Offer the influencer the ability to earn a commission for every sale of your product or service they drive. Over time, your reviewers can become strategic partners for your business.

Social Media Interaction

What is it?

Participating in social media interaction across the web with your accounts and content can be also be a fantastic method for borrowing traffic. Regularly posting, retweeting, sharing, commenting, following, and any other social media activity that interacts with other brands and influencers can send eyes and visitors to your web properties as well.

Why should you do it?

While it can be hard to earn respect and demonstrate expertise or authority in just 140 characters, each interaction can lead to more eyes on you and what you have to say.

If most people are on social media (and studies say they are), then that's also where you're bound to find your customers.

If a brand, influencer, or marketer retweets you, responds to you, or comments on your post, you're encouraging further social interaction with their audience, and putting more eyes on your content.

How do you do it?

Many brands host Q&A sessions on social media, request social interaction and input, ask for blog comments, and more. You simply have to try it and see what works for your business. Many social media automation services allow you to post regularly over time at predetermined dates and times. Consider services like TweetDeck, Hootsuite, Edgar, or Buffer to create a high enough volume of social posts in one setting, and send them out over time.

Social media interaction also takes investment when other people are tweeting or posting about a topic or idea, so try to stay on top of your social media accounts as much as you can. Just participate! You never know what will come of that next post.

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Building Web Traffic

While the previous two B's of traffic building take effort, we're down to the third and final B: Building it. The main difference in building web traffic boils down to creating a high enough volume of content, and having the patience for it to organically take hold on the internet. Building web traffic is really about creating content and refining your web properties so that your website and landing pages will be discovered by people over time.

Content Marketing

People share good content. If you create a resource that provides value to your potential leads and customers, potential customers will not only see you as an authority in what you do, but they'll be more likely to share your resource with others around them who might enjoy it and benefit from it. This drives organic community growth from the content you're creating and the thought leadership you put out into the internet.

Search engines like good content. We'll talk more about search engine optimization in a moment, but in general, search engines give high rankings to high quality content. Solid, long-form blog posts tailored to the keywords your audience is looking for is one of the best ways to make yourself more attractive to search engines, and easier for your potential audience to find.

Content can mean a lot of different things to different people. That being said, there are a few main types of content you can create and use to market your business, that we at Leadpages use nearly every day.

Blogging - Aim for more than 500 words per post, and try to post at least once a week if you can. Write about subjects and use keywords that your potential customers are searching for.

Videos - Film yourself giving advice or doing tutorials, and upload the videos to YouTube. Link back to your website, and publish the videos on your blog as well.

Ebooks - Write 7,500+ words worth of valuable information about a single topic that your audience cares about, and save it as a PDF. Use this as a lead magnet to give away in exchange for a new subscriber's email address or host the entire ebook, on-page, on your website.

Podcasting - To avoid technical barriers, start with a service like SoundCloud, and record podcast episodes with something as simple as your cellphone. Answer questions from existing customers or prospects, or discuss your areas of expertise for 10 minutes at a time.

Infographics - Deliver statistics and information to your audience in a visual format. Not a designer? No problem. Use a service like Fiverr to create an inexpensive but visually stimulating piece of content.

Learning Courses - Provide a grouped and comprehensive set of information in the form of videos, ebooks, checklists, etc. that educates your target audience on a specific topic. Both Leadpages and Drip have had huge success providing these types of courses to our prospects and customers alike.

There are, of course, many other types of content, and ways to execute smart content marketing strategies, but this is a great place to start. Keep in mind: When you create content for your business, you're building a digital reputation for your brand.

Ask yourself: "If someone encountered any of my content outside of my website—never having interacted with me physically or digitally—would they want to do business with me?"

If you can answer yes to that question, you know you're creating good quality content, and you're putting something into the digital universe that will be beneficial to your potential customers—and in turn will be extremely beneficial to your business going forward.

Search Engine Optimization

Often, the foundation of a building web traffic to your website or landing pages is solid search engine optimization (SEO) from the start. It's also important to continue using search engine optimization as your website and business grows.

What does SEO really mean? Essentially, search engines speak a language and they require that the websites and products they rank highly speak that language too. Things like backlinks, page authority, keyword usage and clustering, content length and depth, sharing and more, are all elements of the language that search engines speak. If your website and your landing pages aren't speaking the language of search engines, you simply won't be showing up in organic search results and you won't be building traffic or getting organic visits to your web pages.

The entire purpose of SEO is to make your website and your content as valuable and digestible as possible for the audience members you're looking for.

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Social Media

Social media can be valuable in its own right, as a standalone part of your marketing strategy. However, part of the reason people spend time and resources on growing their social media accounts, is because they can use the communities they create there to drive traffic back to their other web properties. From there, they can sell to those social media audience members or convert them into email subscribers. You too, can use this traffic building strategy.

The difficulty with social media is that it requires time and effort. It involves using the right hashtags, posting the right story at the right time, following and engaging with the right users, and consistently engaging and interacting with a small but growing audience. This undoubtedly takes patience and time.. But that's why this section is titled "Building Traffic." You'll definitely be building traffic with this method, but you'll be doing it brick by brick, piece by piece post by post, and tweet by tweet.

If, however, you're willing to be patient, engage in social media automation, and put in the effort it takes to have thriving social media accounts, then your social media can become a road that drives people to your website and landing pages.

Email Marketing

One of the most popular traffic driving methods in existence is almighty email marketing. With one of the highest rates of engagement over any other digital marketing method, email marketing is a no-brainer for every marketer. If you're already using landing pages to collect email addresses, you can use those audience members to market your products and services to in the future.

Once you have a significant critical mass of email subscribers, marketing to those people can be an exceedingly effective way to grow your business. Since people respond so well to email and open rates and click rates are often significantly higher than social media or other communication tactics, email marketing automation can be an extremely effective method to drive people to the locations you want to send them.

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3 Final Tips to Maximize Your Landing Page Traffic

1. Be patient.

No matter whether it's bought, borrowed, or built, getting consistent, reliable, and high-converting traffic to your website and your landing pages takes time. It's normal to have to wait a little to get the kind of traffic that drives the best results. Depending on which of the three B's that you're relying on most, then it may take much more or much less time. Allow for that, and don't give up.

2. Test your traffic methods.

In the same way we recommend testing landing pages, we recommend testing the traffic methods that get people to them. Just because you wrote one guest post or ran a single PPC campaign that failed to give you the results you wanted, does not mean you should give up on these traffic methods. It also doesn't mean these traffic methods are a bad match for your audience. Sometimes, you'll need to do multiple versions of each method to find the most effective version of it.

If then, after testing your traffic methods, you still haven't found a good match—by all means, move onward. But you won't know until you've tested different versions of each of your traffic driving strategies.

3. Try it all.

One source isn't enough when it comes to driving long term landing page traffic. Over time, the most effective traffic source for your particular business might change. Advertising, organic SEO, and content marketing combined can become a powerful combination of traffic driving. But you won't know if you're not willing to try each source, at least briefly. Be willing to experiment, and go outside of your comfort zone when it comes to traffic-driving methods. Who knows? Perhaps you haven't gotten the results you've always wanted because you avoided the one traffic method that you felt uncomfortable trying. Give it a shot. You've got little to lose and everything to gain.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You've made it through the fifth chapter of The Ultimate Guide to landing pages. We're nearly done with the course, but before we continue on the conclusion of this guide, let's quickly recap everything we've done so far.

In the first chapter we settled on our shared definition of landing pages and answered the question: "What is a landing page?" Next, we covered the variety of types of landing pages that can built or found in the wild, including all of the different ways they can be used to help you grow your business. In our third chapter, we went through a comprehensive guide of how to build landing pages covering everything from copy, to design, to imagery, and more. And in our fourth chapter, we talked about how and why testing your landing pages and optimizing your conversion rate is so important.

Now and this chapter, with a little bit of traffic, you should be up to your ears in leads and quickly growing your business. In the next and final chapter of The Ultimate Guide to landing pages, we'll talk about marketing strategies to tackle next. We'll answer the question: "I've got leads… Now what do I do with them?"

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Leadpages is the number one landing page builder in the world. With over 40,000 customers, and billions of visits to the landing pages that've been built by our clients, we've learned a lot about lead generation and growing small business—and we're excited to share that knowledge with you.

Of course, having more leads is great—but unfortunately, leads by themselves won't grow your business—clients and customers do. So how do you turn a an email prospect into a paying customer? In other words, once you've got someone to talk to on your list, what happens next?

The short answer is: You can choose from many different ways to speak to your leads, offers to provide them, and tactics to help you close sales, to start bringing in revenue. But you need to have a system in place to drive that communication.

Right now, the companies that are winning financially are harnessing the opportunities that marketing automation provides. They're automating the email messages and other tools that drive sales, while avoiding the overwhelm and confusion that often comes along with trying to do too many things without a system in place.

To put it simply: they're choosing marketing automation to turn prospects into customers. And they're doing so with their eyes wide open, and not just jumping in for the sake of trying something new.

In this final chapter of The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages, we're going to discuss the first steps of getting started with marketing automation, so you can communicate with your leads and convert them into customers.

If you're ready to take the next step in your marketing journey, let's get started.

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What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation can be defined in a wide variety of ways. Since there are many different marketing processes for multiple business types, and a plethora of tools to automate parts (or the entirety) of these processes, most companies have their own definition for what marketing automation means.

At its most basic level, marketing automation simply means using a software tool to create cause and effect logic to automate tracking, advertising, digital communication, and more for your leads and customers.

Essentially, marketing automation tools are designed to make something happen if something else happens. As a marketer or business owner, you get to be the one who decides what those things are, when they happen, and which specific things you should be implementing in your specific business.

4 Types of Marketing Automation

As we mentioned, marketing automation takes many different shapes and forms. Some marketing automation tools only do one of the following types of automating, while others combine a few or even all of these types of automation.

To give you a broader understanding of what marketing automation is, let's look at these four different types of marketing automation.

1. Social Media Automation

One of the most common, and simplest, forms of marketing automation is social media automation. These are tools that automate the posting, mix of content, and engagement on a wide variety of social media channels.

2. Email Marketing

Sending emails when, and if, certain behaviors happen, without having to do it manually, is the core purpose of email marketing automation. Using email for communicating one-to-one with your subscribers manually would take far too much time. Email marketing is the easiest way to send patterns of emails over predetermined periods of time, or in response to your prospects and customers completing (or not completing) certain actions.

3. Automation Through Website Tracking

Most marketing automation platforms provide tracking code which can be implemented on your website and landing pages. This tracking code documents the interactions that your prospects and customers take on your websites, and within your emails.

This tracking allows you to understand information about your visitors and connect all of their previous interactions with you, once your new lead has given you their email address. Tracking your prospects and customers allows you to automate your communications with them, based on their behavior over time.

4. Automated Lead Scoring

Marketing automation tools allow you to compile interactions with your audience from a wide variety of locations and services into one place, so you can see a person's engagement with your business from a high level.

This allows you to score your leads, based on how valuable they are. By scoring leads, you can easily identify which potential customers have interacted with you the most frequently, or taken the most valuable types of interactions that are most likely lead to them purchasing your products or services.

There are indeed many more types of marketing automation, with nuances that are not included here. But, with these few basic types, you start to see the picture that a marketing automation can paint for your business.

Marketing Automation Workflow Examples

Once you start using these different types of marketing automation (and connect the tools to implement them), you can start to create workflows. What is a workflow? Essentially, workflows are decision trees of "If this, then that…" logic, that drive a series of actions, interactions, communications, and tags, based on the behaviors of your leads. With a workflow, you can decide exactly which communication your audience members see based on their specific actions.

Just as there are many different types of marketing automation tools out there, there are nearly an infinite number of workflow examples people use to market their businesses. To help lay a foundation for what you can do with marketing automation, let's take a look at a few examples of what workflows can accomplish for you.

Remarketing with Marketing Automation

Tracking website visitors, as mentioned previously, also gives you the opportunity to know who has seen your website and which pages they've seen. Just having this knowledge allows you to create email lists, based on your subscribers' interests. It also allows you to create groups of people who you can send targeted ads to with paid media—again, based on your audience's interests. This process is known as remarketing.

Using the knowledge and information gained from your website tracking code, your marketing automation tool can send contacts to your advertising platforms to specifically re-market your products to those individuals. This often happens through Twitter advertising, Facebook Lead Ads, Google Display Network, and more.

Preselling Products with Marketing Automation

Between product release campaigns and digital delivery, marketing automation can be a perfect complement to preselling products or services from your business.

With a carefully planned email marketing campaign that drives subscribers to your website, and tracks their behavior there, you can make a concerted effort to presell and release a product. Depending on the actions your potential customers take in both your emails and on your website, you can keep refining your pre-sale campaign for the best possible results.

Once your pre-sale is complete, you can also use marketing automation to deliver the product you've presold, at the time you decide. This both saves you time and creates a seamless and professional experience for your new customers.

Cart Abandonment Campaigns with Marketing Automation

When you're tracking website visitors and you've integrated your marketing automation tool with an email service provider, you can automatically send emails to people when they abandon their shopping cart on your website.

How does it work? Essentially, once your web visitor has self-identified by submitting their email address, you'll be able to match their web activity with their email address. If that visitor adds multiple items to your shopping cart, and then leaves your website without completing their purchase—you'll know about it, and you can respond. With marketing automation, you can automatically send an email to that person to encourage them to complete their purchase, and even give them a special discount or other offer to prompt them to do that.

For instance, you could send an automated message to people who reach your checkout page, but don't make it to your post-purchase thank you page, that says:

"Hey! How come you didn't end up buying that thing you wanted!? Come on back, and we'll give you a 10% off coupon, to help you take it home!"

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Getting Started with Email Marketing Automation

One of the most essential elements of converting leads into sales is communication. The best way to communicate with your leads, prospects, and customers is through email marketing automation. Making regular appearances in your prospect's email inbox will keep your company in your prospects' minds, and help lead your potential customers to take the actions you want them to.

There are of course many email marketing automation tools, but email marketing is just one aspect of a marketing automation platform. More often than not, email marketing will be a central element of your marketing automation. If you're just getting started,automating your email communications is a fantastic place to begin.

Let's take a look at a few ways this can work.

3 Email Marketing Campaigns to Start Using Today

If you aren't currently using email marketing campaigns in your business, there are many ways to start. Here's three simple ideas to help you get up and running with automated email marketing campaigns.

1. Introduction Sequences

When a visitor joins your email list for the first time, how should you respond?

Step #1: Introduce yourself. Say hello! Introduction sequences can be a great use of email marketing. It's the easiest way to start building a rapport with new people who are looking to interact with you. It also makes your company seem more human.

When someone joins your email list, you can (and should) automate an introduction sequence that helps your new person get to know you (and your company). Start by answering questions for your new visitors, like what should they expect now that they joined your list? Who are you, and what are you all about? What types of products, services, or information do you offer?

Cultivating relationships is an extremely important part of sales and marketing. Automating an email marketing campaign that does this for you can save you lots of time and earn you more, and better, business.

2. Sales Funnels

Are you trying to sell a product or service to prospects?

Using an automated sales funnel in your email marketing can help you walk your prospect through the decision (and ultimately the process) of purchasing your product or service. Once you have an email address from your prospect, and they've shown interest in one way or another, create a sequence of four emails to walk them through the sale.

Very roughly, you might want to communicate things in an order such as this:

Email #1: "Hey, thanks for showing interest! If you're still looking to purchase my product, here's where to do it!"

Email #2: "I noticed you haven't made a purchase yet. Here's a few reasons you really should! And here's where to buy in case you've forgotten!"

Email #3: "How come you have still haven't bought yet? Here are some customer testimonials who bought and loved the product. Buy it now!"

Email #4: "Looks like you still haven't made a purchase… If this helps, here's a 10% percent off coupon! Get yours today!"

3. Follow Up Sequences

Did someone do something on your site worth noting?

Whether they request more information, download a lead magnet, subscribe to your blog, register for your webinar, or make a purchase—follow up with them! Follow up sequences can be a great way to both engage with your prospects and encourage them to take action. Ask these potential customers questions or for feedback, give them more information, tell them where to get more info from you, or prompt them to follow you on other platforms.

A follow up sequence of 3 to 5 emails, simply automating your interactions with your customers and prospects, can have a huge impact on your engagement.

Marketing Automation Success in 4 Steps

It would be oversimplifying it, to say that marketing automation only takes 4 steps to execute it. There are, however a handful of things you and your business should consider in order to make your venture into marketing automation successful.

Step 1: Decide what the end goal should be.

Begin by asking a very important question: What do I want? As you're getting started with marketing automation, this question will take two forms.

First, put yourself in your customer's shoes. Ask yourself, from their point of view, what is it that they want? What are they looking for? What problem or situation are they looking to solve? Your marketing automation should be a streamlined process to deliver the solution in answer to their question. This should become your primary end goal.

The second form this question takes is this: from your point of view—what do you want? What processes are necessary for your business to be successful? Whether these processes are interactions with prospects, or interactions through delivering your products and services, knowing what you want to achieve will set another end goal for your marketing automation.

When you get clear about the end goals in your business, the decisions around what you use marketing automation for (and how you use it) become much easier.

2. Test your traffic methods.

In the same way we recommend testing landing pages, we recommend testing the traffic methods that get people to them. Just because you wrote one guest post or ran a single PPC campaign that failed to give you the results you wanted, does not mean you should give up on these traffic methods. It also doesn't mean these traffic methods are a bad match for your audience. Sometimes, you'll need to do multiple versions of each method to find the most effective version of it.

If then, after testing your traffic methods, you still haven't found a good match—by all means, move onward. But you won't know until you've tested different versions of each of your traffic driving strategies.

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Step 2: Work backwards from your desired outcome.

Once you have your end goals in mind, you can start to think backwards—and work backwards—from the outcomes you want to see.

Working backwards from those outcomes, you'll be able to start thinking in an "If a person does this, then that should happen..." formula. As you plan out your marketing automation workflows, you'll create situations where your automation behaves differently based on the actions on your prospects and customers. For example:

"If a prospect attends my webinar, then send them a thank you email with a replay, two hours after the event is over."

Or.

"If a prospect attends my webinar, but leaves after 15 minutes, send them an email that says, "Hey, why did you leave?" and provides them a special offer or a replay."

Using this "If this, then that…" logic, working backwards from your desired outcome, will ensure your marketing automation is successful, as these steps are the necessary building blocks of any effective marketing automation workflow.

Step 3: Create a plan, and be willing to throw it out the window.

It's essential to have a plan when it comes to marketing automation. But it's also important to be willing to throw that plan out the window, if—and when—necessary. Creating an automation workflow relies on making informed assumptions about the behaviors of your prospects and customers.

However, once people start moving through your automation workflow, you may find that they aren't behaving the way you assumed they would. This behavior can happen at both large and small scales, so you may need to be willing to throw large or small portions of your automated workflows out the window, when you learn more about the behaviors of your audience.

Regardless, it's important to remember that this isn't only okay—it's fantastic. You're learning about the behaviors of your prospects and customers, and there's little—if anything—more valuable than that.

Step 4: Adjust, add, and refine as you go.

Following from step three, it's important to remember that when you're getting started with marketing automation, it doesn't have to happen all at once.

It's easy to admire larger companies that have marketing automation locked in with large complex workflows, decision trees with hundreds of outcomes, and more. If you're interested in building in that kind of automation, you will get there one day. But when you're getting started with marketing automation, begin with the basics. Automate one process, like an email marketing workflow or a simple sequence to deliver purchased products to your customers.

As you tweak and optimize, add layers of automation as you can. Give yourself quarterly implementation goals for marketing automation, and adjust your pace when you need to.

Take action now and revise later, so that you can start seeing a benefit as soon as possible. And no matter what, keep moving forward. The more data-based adjustments and refinements you complete over time, the better and more effective your marketing automation will be.

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Conclusion

Marketing automation is, without a doubt, the future of the marketing world.

If you're reading this, you know by now, that marketing teams, small business owners, and entrepreneurs are continually pushed to do more with less in an ever-changing marketing landscape. The only true way this demand will be met, is with personalized and automated communications that truly reflect the needs and wants of both your leads and your customers.

Throughout the course of the last six chapters in The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages, we've taken you from your very first landing page to your very first sale, using marketing automation. If you need a refresher on anything we've covered so far, here's a quick recap:

In Chapter 1, we started at the very beginning by answering the most basic of questions: "What is a landing page?"

From there, Chapter 2 we covered nearly all of the landing page uses we see and recommend on a daily basis with our customers.

Next, in Chapter 3, we provided a comprehensive guide to creating landing pages, from copy to design to selecting the best template for your needs.

In Chapter 4, we talked about landing page optimization and how to make your landing pages perform as well as you possibly can.

In our penultimate chapter, Chapter 5, we covered the invaluable practice of driving landing page traffic, and all the ways to attract more eyes on your pages.

We can't wait to see you succeed with the incredible combination of landing pages and marketing automation. Growing your business is our business, so please reach out on the Leadpages Facebook group or the Leadpages Twitter account and tell us how the information in this guide has been beneficial to you; share your success with us!

And if this section of The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages was valuable to you, you can download the entire chapter in PDF form for free.

Leadpages is the number one landing page builder in the world. With over 40,000 customers, and billions of visits to the landing pages that've been built by our clients, we've learned a lot about lead generation and growing small business—and we're excited to share that knowledge with you.